Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

  “Ten or twenty miles away from where? I’m not clear, yet, on whether I would be working in New York for Electrical Till, or in Fort Meade for this, uh, this new thing—”

  “We’re thinking of calling it the National Security Agency,” Comstock says. “Of course, even that name is secret.”

  “I understand.”

  “There was a similar thing, between the wars, called the Black Chamber. Which has a nice ring to it. But a bit old-fashioned.”

  “That was disbanded.”

  “Yes. Secretary of State Stimson did away with it, he said ‘Gentlemen do not read one another’s mail.’ ” Comstock laughs out loud at this. He laughs for a long time. “Ahh, the world has changed, hasn’t it, Waterhouse? Without reading Hitler’s and Tojo’s mail, where would we be now?”

  “We would be in a heck of a fix,” Waterhouse concedes.

  “You have seen Bletchley Park. You have seen Central Bureau in Brisbane. Those places are nothing less than factories. Mail-reading on an industrial scale.” Comstock’s eyes glitter at the idea, he is staring through the walls of the building now like Superman with his X-ray vision. “It is the way of the future, Lawrence. War will never be the same. Hitler is gone. The Third Reich is history. Nippon is soon to fall. But this only sets the stage for the struggle with Communism. To build a Bletchley Park big enough for that job, why, hell! We’d have to take over the whole state of Utah or something. That is, if we did it the old-fashioned way, with girls sitting in front of Typex machines.”

  For the first time, now, Waterhouse gets it. “The digital computer,” he says.

  “The digital computer,” Comstock echoes. He sips and grimaces. “A few roomfuls of that equipment would replace an acre of girls sitting in front of Typex machines.” Comstock now gets a naughty, conspiratorial grin on his face, and leans forward. A drop of sweat rolls off the point of his chin and plonks into Waterhouse’s coffee. “It would also replace a lot of the stuff that Electrical Till manufactures. So, you see, there is a confluence of interests here.” Comstock sets his cup down. Perhaps he is finally convinced that there is no deep stratum of good coffee concealed underneath the bad; perhaps coffee is a frivolous thing compared to the importance of what he is about to divulge. “I have been in constant touch with my higher-ups at Electrical Till, and there is intense interest in this digital computer business. Intense interest. The machinery has already been set in motion for a business deal—and, Waterhouse, I only tell you this because, as we have established, you are good at keeping secrets.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “A business deal that would bring Electrical Till, the world’s mightiest manufacturer of business machines, together with the government of the United States to construct a machine room of titanic proportions at Fort Meade, Maryland, under the aegis of this new Black Chamber: the National Security Agency. It is an installation that will be the Bletchley Park of our upcoming war against the Communist threat—a threat both internal and external.”

  “And you would like me to get mixed up in this somehow?”

  Comstock blinks. He draws back. He is suddenly cool and remote. “To be absolutely frank, Waterhouse, this thing will go forward with or without you.”

  Waterhouse chuckles. “I figured that.”

  “All I’m doing is giving you a greased path, as it were. Because I respect your skills, and I have a certain, I don’t know, fatherly affection for you as the result of our work together. I hope you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Say! And speaking of that—” Comstock stands up, walking around behind his terrifyingly neat desk, and plucks a single piece of typing paper off the blotter. “How are you coming with Arethusa?”

  “Still archiving the intercepts as they come in. Still haven’t broken it.”

  “I have some interesting news about Arethusa.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. Something you’re not aware of.” Comstock scans the paper. “After we took Berlin, we scooped up all of Hitler’s crypto people and flew thirty-five of them back to London. Our boys there have been interrogating them in detail. Filling in a lot of blanks for us. What do you know about this Rudolf von Hacklheber fellow?”

  All traces of moisture have disappeared from Waterhouse’s mouth. He sips and does not grimace. “Knew him a little at Princeton. Dr. Turing and I thought we saw his handiwork in Azure/Pufferfish.”

  “You were right,” Comstock says, rattling the paper. “But did you know that he was very likely a Communist?”

  “I had no knowledge of his political leanings.”

  “Well, he is a homo, for one thing, and Hitler hated homos, so that might have pushed him into the arms of the Reds. Also, he was working under a couple of Russians at Hauptgruppe B. Supposedly they were Czarists, and pro-Hitler, but you never know. Well, anyway, in the middle of the war, sometime in late ’43, he apparently fled to Sweden. Isn’t that funny?”

  “Why’s it funny?”

  “If you have the wherewithal to escape from Germany, why not go to England, and fight for the good guys? No, he went to the east coast of Sweden—directly across the water,” Comstock says portentously, “from Finland. Which borders on the Soviet Union.” He slaps the page down on his desk. “Seems pretty clear-cut to me.”

  “So…”

  “And now, we have these goddamn Arethusa messages bouncing around. Some of them emanating from right here in Manila! Some coming from a mysterious submarine. Not a Nip submarine, evidently. It seems very much like a secret espionage ring of some description. Wouldn’t you say so?”

  Waterhouse shrugs. “Interpretation isn’t my department.”

  “It is mine,” Comstock says, “and I say it’s espionage. Probably directed from the Kremlin. Why? Because they are using a cryptosystem that, according to you, is based on Azure/Pufferfish, which was invented by the Communist homo Rudolf von Hacklheber. I hypothesize that von Hacklheber only stayed in Sweden long enough to get some shuteye and maybe cornhole some nice blond boy and then scooted right over to Finland and from there to the waiting arms of Lavrenti Beria.”

  “Well, gosh!” Waterhouse says, “what do you think we should do?”

  “I have taken this Arethusa thing off the back burner. We have become lazy and complacent. More than once, our huffduff people observed Arethusa messages emanating from this general area.” Comstock raises his index finger to a map of Luzon. Then he catches himself, realizing that this would be more dignified if he used a pointer. He bends down and grabs a long pointer. Then he realizes he is too close, and has to back up a couple of steps in order to get the business end of the pointer on the part of the map that his index finger was touching a moment earlier. Finally situated, he vigorously circles a coastal region south of Manila, along the strait that separates Luzon from Mindoro. “South of all these volcanoes, along the coast here. This is where that submarine has been skulking around. We haven’t gotten a good fix on the bastards yet, because all of our huffduff stations have been way up north here.” The pointer swoops up for a lightning raid on the Cordillera Central, where Yamashita has gone to ground. “But not anymore.” Down swoops the pointer, vengefully. “I have ordered several huffduff units to set up in this area, and at the northern end of Mindoro. Next time that submarine transmits an Arethusa message, we’ll have Catalinas overhead within fifteen minutes.”

  “Well,” Waterhouse volunteers, “maybe I should get cracking on breaking that darn code, then.”

  “If you could accomplish that, Waterhouse, it would be brilliant. It would mean victory in this, our first cryptological skirmish with the Communists. It would be a splendid kick-off for your relationship with Electrical Till and the NSA. We could set your new bride up with a nice house in the horse country, a gas stove, and a Hoover that would make her forget all about the Palouse Hills.”

  “Sounds pretty darn inviting,” Waterhouse says. “I just can’t hold myself back!” And with that, he’s out the d
oor.

  In a stone room in a half-ruined church, Enoch Root looks out of a busted window and grimaces. “I am not a mathematician,” he says. “I only did the calculations that Dengo asked me to do. You will have to ask him to encrypt the message.”

  “Find another place for your transmitter,” Waterhouse says, “and be ready to use it on short notice.”

  Goto Dengo is right where he said he would be, sitting on the bleachers above third base. The ballfield has been repaired, but no one is playing now. He and Waterhouse have the place to themselves, except for a couple of poor Filipino peasants, driven down to Manila by the war up north, scavenging for dropped popcorn.

  “What you ask is very dangerous,” he says.

  “It will be totally secret,” Waterhouse says.

  “Think into the future,” says Goto Dengo. “One day, these digital computers you speak of will break the Arethusa code. Is this not so?”

  “It is so. Not for many years.”

  “Say ten years. Say twenty years. The code is broken. Then they will go back and find all of the old Arethusa messages—including the message that you want to send to your friends—and read them. So?”

  “Yes. It is true.”

  “And then they will see this message that says, ‘Warning, warning, Comstock has laid a trap, the huffduff stations are waiting for you, do not transmit.’ Then they will know that there was a spy in Comstock’s office. Certainly they will know it was you.”

  “You’re right. You’re right. I didn’t think of that,” Waterhouse says. Then he realizes something else. “They’ll know about you too.”

  Goto Dengo blanches. “Please. I am so tired.”

  “One of the Arethusa messages spoke of a person named GD.”

  Goto Dengo puts his head in his hands and is perfectly motionless for a long time. He does not have to say it. He and Waterhouse are imagining the same thing: twenty years in the future, Nipponese police burst into the office of Goto Dengo, prosperous businessman, and arrest him for being a Communist spy.

  “Only if they decrypt those old messages,” Waterhouse says.

  “But they will. You said that they will decrypt them.”

  “Only if they have them,” Waterhouse says.

  “But they do have them.”

  “They are in my office.”

  Goto Dengo is shocked, horrified. “You are not thinking to steal the messages?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”

  “But this will be noticed.”

  “No! I will replace them with others.”

  The voice of Alan Mathison Turing shouts above the buzz of the Project X synchronization tone. The long-playing record, filled with noise, spins on its turntable. “You want the latest in random numbers?”

  “Yeah. Some mathematical function that will give me nearly perfect randomness. I know you’ve been working on this.”

  “Oh yes,” Turing says. “I can provide a much higher degree of randomness than what is on these idiotic phonograph records that you and I are staring at.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “I have in mind a zeta function that is simple to understand, extremely tedious to calculate. I hope you have laid in a good stock of valves.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Alan.”

  “Do you have a pencil?”

  “Of course.”

  “Very well then,” Turing says, and begins to call out the symbols of the function.

  The Basement is suffocatingly hot because Waterhouse shares it with a coworker who generates thousands of watts of body heat. The coworker both eats and shits ETC cards. What it does in between is Waterhouse’s business.

  He spends about twenty-four hours sitting there, stripped to the waist, his undershirt wrapped around his head like a turban so he won’t drop sweat into the works and cause short circuits, flicking switches on the digital computer’s front panel, swapping patch cords on the back, replacing burned-out tubes and bulbs, probing malfunctioning circuits with an oscilloscope. In order to make the computer execute Alan’s random number function, he even has to design a new circuit board on the fly, and solder it together. The entire time, he knows, Goto Dengo and Enoch Root are at work somewhere in Manila with scratch paper and pencils, encrypting the final Arethusa message.

  He doesn’t have to wonder whether they’ve transmitted it. He will be told.

  Indeed, a lieutenant from the Intercept section comes in at about five in the evening, looking triumphant.

  “You got an Arethusa message?”

  “Two of them,” the lieutenant says, holding up two separate sheets with grids of letters on them. “A collision!”

  “A collision?”

  “A transmitter opened up down south first.”

  “On land, or—?”

  “At sea—off the northeast end of Palawan. They transmitted this.” He waves one of the sheets. “Then, almost immediately, a transmitter in Manila came on the air, and sent this.” He waves the other sheet.

  “Does Colonel Comstock know about this?”

  “Oh, yes sir! He was just leaving for the day when the messages came through. He’s been on the horn to his huffduff people, the Air Force, the whole bit. He thinks we’ve got the bastards!”

  “Well, before you get carried away celebrating, could you do me a favor?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “What did you do with all of the original intercept sheets for the archived Arethusa messages?”

  “They’re filed, sir. Do you want to see them?”

  “Yes. All of them. I need to check them against the versions on the ETC cards. If Arethusa works the way I think it does, then even a single mistranscribed letter could render all of my calculations useless.”

  “I’ll go and fetch them, sir! I’m not going home anyway.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Why, no sir! I want to wait around and see how it all comes out with that darned submarine.”

  Waterhouse goes to the oven and takes out a brick of hot, blank ETC cards. He has learned that he has to keep the cards hot, or else they will soak up the tropical humidity and jam the machinery; so before he moved the digital computer into this room, he insisted that a whole bank of ovens be installed.

  He drops the hot cards into the hopper of a card punching machine, sits down at the keyboard, and clips the first intercept sheet up in front of him. He begins to punch the letters into it, one by one. It is a short message; it fits onto three cards. Then he begins punching in the second message.

  The lieutenant comes in carrying a cardboard box. “All of the original Arethusa intercept sheets.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  The lieutenant looks over his shoulder. “Can I help you transcribing those messages?”

  “No. The best way for you to help me would be to refill my water pitcher and then don’t bother me for the rest of the night. I have a bee in my bonnet about this Arethusa business.”

  “Yes, sir!” says the lieutenant, insufferably cheerful about the fact that the mystery submarine is, even now, on the run from Catalina bombers.

  Waterhouse finishes punching in the second message, though he already knows what it would say if it were decrypted: “TRAP REPEAT TRAP DO NOT TRANSMIT STOP HUFFDUFF UNITS NEARBY.”

  He takes those cards out of the puncher’s output tray and places them neatly in the box along with the cards containing all of the previous Arethusa messages. He then takes the entire contents of this box—a brick of messages about a foot thick—and puts them into his attache case.

  He unclips the two fresh intercept slips from the card puncher and puts them on top of the stack of older slips. The brick of cards in his attache case, and the pile of slips in his hand, contain exactly the same information. They are the only copies in all the world. He flips through them to make sure that they contain all of the critical intercepts—such as the long message giving the location of Golgotha, and the one that mentions Goto Dengo’s initials. He pu
ts the whole stack of slips on top of one of the ovens.

  He dumps a foot-thick stack of hot blank cards into the input hopper of the card punch. He connects the punch’s control cable up to the digital computer, so that the computer can control it.

  Then he starts the program he has written, the one that generates random numbers according to Turing’s function. Lights flash, and the card reader whirrs, as the program is loaded into the computer’s RAM. Then it pauses, waiting for input: the function needs a seed. A stream of bits that will get it going. Any seed will do. Waterhouse thinks about it for a moment, and then types in COMSTOCK.

  The card punch rumbles into action. The stack of blanks begins to get shorter. Punched cards skitter into the output tray. When it’s finished, Waterhouse pulls one of them out, holds it up to the light, and looks at the pattern of tiny rectangular holes punched out of the manila. A constellation of doorways.

  “It’ll look like any other encrypted message,” he explained to Goto Dengo, up on the bleachers, “but the, uh, the crypto boys” (he almost said the NSA) “can run their computers on them forever and never break the code—because there is no code.”

  He puts this stack of freshly punched cards into the box labeled ARETHUSA INTERCEPTS, and puts it back in its place on the shelf.

  Finally, before leaving the lab, he goes back over to that oven, and slides the corner of that stack of intercept sheets very close to a pilot light. It is reluctant to catch, so he gives it some help with a flick of his Zippo. He stands back and watches the pile burn for a while, until he’s sure that all of the strange information on those sheets has been destroyed.

  Then he goes out into the hallway in search of a fire extinguisher. Upstairs, he can hear Comstock’s boys, gathered around the radio, baying like hounds.

  PASSAGE

  * * *

  WHEN HE HAS PICKED HIMSELF UP OFF THE DECK, AND his ears have stopped ringing, Bischoff says, “Take her down to seventy-five meters.”