Cryptonomicon (22 page)

“Okay,” Randy says. “Should I bring my partner out?”

“The concept I am about to convey to you is very simple and does not require two first-rate minds in order to process it,” Doug Shaftoe says.

“Okay. What is the concept?”

“The detailed survey will be just chock-f of new information about what is on the floor of the ocean in this part of the world. Some of that information might be valuable. More valuable than you imagine.”

“Ah,” Randy says. “You mean that it might be the kind of thing that your company knows how to capitalize on.”

“That’s right,” says Doug Shaftoe. “Now, if you hire one of my competitors to perform your survey, and they stumble on this kind of information, they will not tell you about it. They will exploit it themselves. You will not know that they have found anything and you will not profit from it. But if you hire Semper Marine Services, I will tell you about whatever I find, and I will cut you and your company in on a share of any proceeds.”

“Hmmmm,” Randy says. He is trying to figure out how to do a poker face, but he knows that Shaftoe sees right through him.

“On one condition,” Doug Shaftoe says.

“I suspected there might be a condition.”

“Every hook that’s worth a damn has a barb. This is the barb.”

“What is it?” Randy asks.

“We keep it a secret from that son of a bitch,” Doug Shaftoe says, jerking his thumb at Hubert Kepler. “Because
if the Dentist finds out, then he and the Bolobolos will just split the entire thing up between them and we’ll see nothing. There’s even a chance we would end up dead.”

“Well, the being dead part is something that we will certainly have to think about,” Randy says, “but I will convey your proposal to my partner.”

W
ATERHOUSE AND A FEW DOZEN STRANGERS ARE
standing and sitting in an extraordinarily long, narrow room that rocks from side to side. The room is lined with windows but no light comes into them, only sound: a great deal of rumbling, rattling, and screeching. Everyone is pensive and silent, as if they were sitting in church waiting for the service to kick off.

Waterhouse is standing up gripping a ceiling-mounted protuberance that keeps him from being rocked right onto his can. For the last couple of minutes he has been staring at a nearby poster providing instructions on how to put on a gas mask. Waterhouse, like everyone else, is carrying one such device with him in a small dun canvas shoulder bag. Waterhouse’s looks different from everyone else’s because it is American and military. It has drawn a stare or two from the others.

On the poster is a lovely and stylish woman with white skin, and auburn hair which appears to have been chemically melted and reset into its current shape at a quality salon. She stands upright, her spine like a flagpole, chin in the air, elbows bent, hands ritualistically posed: fingers splayed, thumbs sticking straight up in the air just in front of her face. A sinister lump dangles between her hands, held in a cat’s-cradle of khaki strapping. Her upthrust thumbs are the linchpins of this tidy web.

Waterhouse has been in London for a couple of days now and so he knows the next part of the story. He would know this pose anywhere. This woman is poised for the chin thrust. If gas ever falls on the capital, the gas rattles will
sound and the tops of the massive mailboxes, which have all been treated with special paint, will turn black. Twenty million thumbs will point into the greenish, poison sky, ten million gas masks will dangle from them, ten million chins will thrust. He can just imagine the crisp luscious sound of this woman’s soft white skin forcing itself into the confining black rubber.

Once the chin-thrust is complete, all is well. You have to get the straps neatly arranged atop your auburn permanent and get indoors, but the worst danger is past. The British gas masks have a squat round fitting on the front to allow exhalation, which looks exactly like the snout of a pig, and no woman would be caught dead in such a thing if the models in the gas mask posters were not such paragons of high-caste beauty.

Something catches his eye out in the darkness beyond the window. The train has reached one of those parts of the Underground where dim gun-barrel-colored light sifts down, betraying the stygian secrets of the Tube. Everyone in the car blinks, glances, and draws breath. The World has rematerialized around them for a moment. Fragments of wall, encrusted trusses, bundles of cable hang in space out there, revolving slowly, like astronomical bodies, as the train works its way past.

The cables catch Waterhouse’s eye: neatly bracketed to the stone walls in parallel courses. They are like the creepers of some plutonic ivy that spreads through the darkness of the Tube when the maintenance men aren’t paying attention, seeking a place to break out and up into the light.

When you walk along the street, up there in the Overground, you see the first tendrils making their way up the ancient walls of the buildings. Neoprene-jacketed vines that grow in straight lines up sheer stone and masonry and inject themselves through holes in windowframes, homing in particularly on offices. Sometimes they are sheathed in metal tubes. Sometimes the owners have painted them over. But all of them share a common root system that flourishes in the unused channels and crevices of the Underground, converging on giant switching stations in deep bomb-proof vaults.

The train invades a cathedral of dingy yellow light, and groans to a stop, hogging the aisle. Lurid icons of national paranoia glow in the niches and grottoes. An angelic chin-thrusting woman anchors one end of the moral continuum. At the opposite we have a succubus in a tight skirt, sprawled on a davenport in the midst of a party, smirking through her false eyelashes as she eavesdrops on the naive young servicemen gabbing away behind her.

Signs on the wall identify this as Euston in a tasteful sans-serif that screams official credibility. Waterhouse and most of the other people get off the train. After fifteen minutes or so of ricocheting around the station’s precincts, asking directions and puzzling out timetables, Waterhouse finds himself sitting aboard an intercity train bound for Birmingham. Along the way, it is promised, it will stop at a place called Bletchley.

Part of the reason for the confusion is that there is another train about to leave from an adjacent siding, which goes straight to Bletchley, its final destination, with no stops in between. Everyone on that train, it seems, is a female in a quasimilitary uniform.

The RAF men with the Sten guns, standing watch by each door of that train, checking papers and passes, will not let him aboard. Waterhouse looks through the yellowing influence of the windows at the Bletchley girls in the train, facing each other in klatsches of four and five, getting their knitting out of their bags, turning balls of Scottish wool into balaclavas and mittens for convoy crews in the North Atlantic, writing letters to their brothers in the service and their mums and dads at home. The RAF gunmen remain by the doors until all of them are closed and the train has begun to move out of the station. As it builds speed, the rows and rows of girls, knitting and writing and chatting, blur together into something that probably looks a good deal like what sailors and soldiers the world over are commonly seeing in their dreams. Waterhouse will never be one of those soldiers, out on the front line, out in contact with the enemy. He has tasted the apple of forbidden knowledge. He is forbidden to go anywhere in the world where he might be captured by the enemy.

*  *  *

The train climbs up out of the night and into a red-brick arroyo, headed northwards out of the city. It is about three in the afternoon; that special BP train must have been carrying swing shift gals.

Waterhouse has the feeling he will not be working anything like a regular shift. His duffel bag—which was packed for him—is pregnant with sartorial possibilities: thick oiled-wool sweaters, tropical-weight Navy and Army uniforms, black ski mask, condoms.

The train slowly pulls free of the city and passes into a territory patched with small residential towns. Waterhouse feels heavy in his seat, and suspects a slight uphill tendency. They pass through a cleft that has been made across a low range of hills, like a kerf in the top of a log, and enter into a lovely territory of subtly swelling emerald green fields strewn randomly with small white capsules that he takes to be sheep.

Of course, their distribution is probably not random at all—it probably reflects local variations in soil chemistry producing grass that the sheep find more or less desirable. From aerial reconnaissance, the Germans could draw up a map of British soil chemistry based upon analysis of sheep distribution.

The fields are enclosed by old hedges, stone fences, or, especially in the uplands, long swaths of forest. After an hour or so, the forest comes right up along the left side of the train, covering a bank that rises up gently from the railway siding. The train’s brakes come on gassily, and the train grumbles to a stop in a whistle-stop station. But the line has forked and ramified quite a bit, more than is warranted by the size of the station. Waterhouse stands, plants his feet squarely, squats down in a sumo wrestler’s stance, and engages his duffel bag. Duffel appears to be winning as it seemingly pushes Waterhouse out the door of the train and onto the platform.

There is a stronger than usual smell of coal, and a good deal of noise coming from not far away. Waterhouse looks up the line and discovers a heavy industrial works unfurled across the many sidings. He stands and stares for a couple of
minutes, as his train pulls away, headed for points north, and sees that they are in the business of repairing steam locomotives here at Bletchley Depot. Waterhouse likes trains.

But that is not why he got a free suit of clothes and a ticket to Bletchley, and so once again Waterhouse engages Duffel and gets it up the stairs to the enclosed bridge that flies over all of the parallel lines. Looking toward the station, he sees more Bletchley girls, WAAFs and WRENs, coming towards him; the day shift, finished with their work, which consists of the processing of ostensibly random letters and digits on a heavy-industrial scale. Not wanting to appear ridiculous in their sight, he finally gets Duffel maneuvered onto his back, gets his arms through the shoulder straps, and allows its weight to throw him forward across the bridge.

The WAAFs and WRENs are only moderately interested in the sight of a newly arriving American officer. Or perhaps they are only being demure. In any case, Waterhouse knows he is one of the few, but not the first. Duffel shoves him through the one-room station like a fat cop chivvying a hammerlocked drunk across the lobby of a two-star hotel. Waterhouse is ejected into a strip of open territory running along the north-south road. Directly across from him the woods rise up. Any notion that they might be woods of the inviting sort is quickly dissolved by a dense spray of gelid light glinting from the border of the wood as the low sun betrays that the place is saturated with sharpened metal. There is an orifice in the woods, spewing WAAFs and WRENs like the narrow outlet of a giant yellowjacket nest.

Waterhouse must either move forward or be pulled onto his back by Duffel and left squirming helplessly in the parking lot like a flipped beetle, so he staggers forward, across the street and onto the wide footpath into the woods. The Bletchley girls surround him. They have celebrated the end of their shift by applying lipstick. Wartime lipstick is necessarily cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all of the good stuff was used to coat propeller shafts. A florid and cloying scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins.

It is the smell of War.

Waterhouse has not even been given the full tour of BP
yet, but he knows the gist of it. He knows that these demure girls, obediently shuffling reams of gibberish through their machines, shift after shift, day after day, have killed more men than Napoleon.

He makes slow and apologetic progress against the tide of the departing day shift. At one point he simply gives up, steps aside, body-slams Duffel into the ivy, lights up a cigarette, and waits for a burst of a hundred or so girls to go by him. Something pokes at his ankle: a wild raspberry cane, furious with thorns. It supports an uncannily small and tidy spiderweb whose geodesic strands gleam in a beam of low afternoon light. The spider in the center is an imperturbable British sort, perfectly unruffled by Waterhouse’s clumsy Yank antics.

Waterhouse reaches out and catches a yellow-brown elm leaf that happens to fall through the air before him. He hunkers down, plants his cigarette in his mouth, and, using both hands for steadiness, draws the sawtooth rim of the elm leaf across one of the web’s radial strands, which, he knows, will not have any sticky stuff on it. Like a fiddle bow on a string, the leaf sets up a fairly regular vibration in the web. The spider spins to face it, rotating instantly, like a character in a badly spliced movie. Waterhouse is so startled by the speed of the move that he starts back just a bit, then he draws the leaf across the web again. The spider tenses, feeling the vibrations.

Eventually it returns to its original position and carries on as before, ignoring Waterhouse completely.

Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. The strands are an extension of its nervous system. Information propagates down the gossamer and into the spider, where it is processed by some kind of internal Turing machine. Waterhouse has tried many different tricks, but he has never been able to spoof a spider. Not a good omen!

The rush hour seems to have ended during Waterhouse’s science experiment. He engages Duffel once more. The struggle takes them another hundred yards down the path,
which finally empties out into a road just at the point where it is barred by an iron gate slung between stupid obelisks of red brick. The guards are, again, RAF men with Sten guns, and right now they are examining the papers of a man in a canvas greatcoat and goggles, who has just ridden up on an Army green motorcycle with panniers slung over the rear wheel. The panniers are not especially full, but they have been carefully secured; they contain the ammunition that the girls feed into the chattering teeth of their ravenous weapons.

The motorcyclist is waved through, and makes an immediate left turn down a narrow lane. Attention falls upon Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, who after a suitable exchange of salutes, presents his credentials.

He has to choose among his several sets, which he doesn’t manage to hide from the guards. But the guards do not seem alarmed or even curious about this, which sets them distinctly apart from most whom Waterhouse has dealt with. Naturally, these men are not on the Ultra Mega list, and so it would be a grave breach of security to tell them that he was here on Ultra Mega business. They appear to have greeted many other men who can’t state their real business, however, and don’t bat an eyelash when Lawrence pretends to be one of the naval intelligence liaisons in Hut 4 or Hut 8.

Hut 8 is where they decrypt naval Enigma transmissions. Hut 4 accepts the decrypts from Hut 8 and analyzes them. If Waterhouse pretends to be a Hut 4 man the disguise will not last for long, because those fellows have to actually know something about the Navy. He perfectly fits the profile of a Hut 8 man, who need not know anything except pure math.