Cryptonomicon (93 page)

“I was going to say the Battle of the Somme,” Randy says.

“Not as good an analogy because there are no trenches,” Chester says. He is still pointing down towards the lake. “But
if you look near the waterline you can just make out some railroad ties, half-buried. That’s where we laid the tracks.”

“Tracks?” Amy says, the only word she’s been able to get out of her mouth since Randy drove his Acura through the main gate. Randy told her, on the way over here, that if he, Randy, had a hundred thousand dollars for every order of magnitude by which Chester’s net worth currently exceeds his, then he (Randy) would never have to work again. This turned out to be more clever than informative, and so Amy was not prepared for what they have found here and is still steepling her eyebrows.

“For the locomotive,” Chester says. “There are no railway lines nearby, so we barged the locomotive in and then winched it up a short railway into the foyer.”

Amy just scrunches up her face, silent.

“Amy hasn’t seen the articles,” Randy says.

“Oh! Sorry,” Chester says, “I’m into obsolete technology. The house is a museum of dead tech. Stick your hand into these things.”

Lined up before the front entrance are four waist-high pedestals, emblazoned with the Novus Ordo Seclorum eyeball/pyramid logo, with outlines of hands stenciled onto their lids, and knobs in the lagoons between the fingers. Randy fits his hand into place and feels the knobs slide in their grooves, reading and memorizing the geometry of his hand. “The house knows who you are now,” Chester says, typing their names into a ruggedized, weatherproofed keyboard, “and I’m giving you a certain privilege constellation that I use for personal guests—now you can come in through the main gate and park your car and wander around the grounds whether or not I’m home. And you can enter the house if I’m home, but if I’m not home, it’ll be locked to you. And you can wander freely in the house except for certain offices where I keep proprietary corporate documents.”

“You have your own company or something?” Amy says weakly.

“No. After Randy and Avi left town, I dropped out of college and snagged a job with a local company, which I still have,” Chester says.

The front door, a translucent crystal slab on a track, slides open. Randy and Amy follow Chester into his house. As advertised, there is a full-scale steam locomotive in the foyer.

“The house is patterned after flex-space,” Chester says.

“What’s that?” Amy asks. She is completely turned off by the locomotive.

“A lot of high-tech companies get started in flex-space, which just means a big warehouse with no internal walls or partitions—just a few pillars to hold up the ceiling. You can drag partitions around to divide it up into rooms.”

“Like cubicles?”

“Same idea, but the partitions go up higher so you have a feeling of being in a real room. Of course, they don’t go all the way up to the ceiling. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be room for the TWA.”

“The what?” Amy asks. Chester, who is leading them into the maze of partitions, answers the question by tilting his head back and looking straight up.

The roof of the house is made entirely of glass, held up by a trusswork of white painted steel tubes. It is maybe forty or fifty feet above the floor. The partitions rise to a height of maybe twelve feet. In the gap above the partitions and below the ceiling, a grid has been constructed, a scaffolding of red pipes, nearly as vast as the house itself. Thousands, millions, of aluminum shreds are trapped in that space grid, like torn tufts caught in a three-dimensional screen. It looks like an artillery shell the length of a football field that has exploded into shrapnel a microsecond ago and been frozen in place; light filters through the metal scraps, trickles down bundles of shredded wiring and glances flatly off the crusts of melted and hardened upholstery. It is so vast and so close that when Amy and Randy first look up at it they flinch, expecting it to fall on them. Randy already knows what it is. But Amy has to stare at it for a long time, and prowl from room to room, viewing it from different angles, before it takes shape in her mind, and becomes recognizable as something familiar: a 747.

“The FAA and NTSB were surprisingly cool about it,” Chester muses. “Which makes sense. I mean, they’ve reconstructed this thing in a hangar, right? Dredged up all the
pieces, figured out where they go, and hung them on this grid. They’ve gone over it and gathered all the forensic evidence they could find, hosed out all the human remains and disposed of them properly, sterilized the debris so that the crash investigation team doesn’t have to worry about getting AIDS from touching a bloody flange or something. And they’re done with it. And they’re paying like rent on this hangar. They can’t throw it away. They have to store it somewhere. So all I had to do was get the house certified as a federal warehouse, which was a pretty easy legal hack. And if there’s a lawsuit, I have to let the lawyers in to go over it. But really it was not a problem to do this. The Boeing guys love it, they’re over here all the time.”

“It’s like a resource to them,” Randy guesses.

“Yeah.”

“You like to play that role.”

“Sure! I have defined a privilege constellation specifically for engineer types who can come here anytime they want to access the house as a museum of dead tech. That’s what I mean by the flex space analogy. To me and my guests, it’s a home. To these visitors… there’s one right there.” Chester waves his arm across the room (it is a central room maybe fifty meters on a side) at an engineer type who has set up a Hasselblad on a huge tripod and is pointing it straight up at a bent landing gear strut “ . . . to them it’s exactly like a museum in that there are places they can go and other places that if they step over the line will set off alarms and get them in trouble.”

“Is there a gift shop?” Amy jokes.

“The gift shop is roughed in, but not up and running—the LOHO throws up all kinds of impediments,” Chester grumbles.

They end up in a relatively cozy glass-walled room with a view across the churned mud to the lake. Chester fires up an espresso machine that looks like a scale model of an oil refinery and generates a brace of lattes. This room happens to be underneath the TWA’s left wing tip, which is relatively intact. Randy realizes, now, that the entire plane has been hung in a gentle banking attitude, like it’s making an imperceptible course change, which is not really appropriate;
a vertical dive would make more sense, but then the house would have to be fifty stories high to accommodate it. He can see a repeating pattern of tears in the wing’s skin that seems to be an expression of the same underlying math that generates repeating vortices in a wake, or swirls in a Mandelbrot set. Charlene and his friends used to heckle him for being a Platonist, but everywhere he goes he sees the same few ideal forms shadowed in the physical world. Maybe he’s just stupid or something.

The house lacks a woman’s touch. Randy gathers, from hints dropped by Chester, that the TWA has not turned out to be the conversation starter that he had hoped it would be. He is considering building fake ceilings over some of the house’s partitions so that they will feel more like rooms, which, he admits, might make “some people” feel more comfortable there and open the possibility of their committing themselves to “an extended stay.” So evidently he is in early negotiations with some kind of female, which is good news.

“Chester, two years ago you sent me e-mail about a project you were launching to build replicas of early computers. You wanted information about my grandfather’s work.”

“Yeah,” Chester says. “You want to see that stuff? It’s been on the back burner, but—”

“I just inherited some of his notebooks,” Randy says.

Chester’s eyebrows go up. Amy glances out the window; her hair, skin, and clothes take on a pronounced reddish tinge from Doppler effect as she drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity.

“I want to know if you have a functioning ETC card reader.”

Chester snorts. “That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“You want a 1932 Mark III card reader? Or a 1938 Mark IV? Or a—”

“Does it make any difference? They all read the same cards, right?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“I have some cards from circa 1945 that I would like to have read out onto a floppy disk that I can take home.”

Chester picks up a cellphone the size of a gherkin and begins to prod it. “I’ll call my card man,” he says. “Retired ETC engineer. Lives on Mercer Island. Comes up here on his boat a couple times a week and tinkers with this stuff. He’ll be really excited to meet you.”

While Chester is conversing with his card man, Amy meets Randy’s eyes and gives him a look that is almost perfectly unreadable. She seems a bit deflated. Worn down. Ready to go home. Her very unwillingness to show her feelings confirms this. Before this trip, Amy would have agreed that it takes all kinds to make a world. She’d still assent to it now. But Randy’s been showing her some practical applications of that concept, in the last few days, that are going to take her a while to fit into her world-view. Or, more importantly, into her Randy-view. And sure enough, the moment Chester’s off the phone, she’s asking if she can use it to call the airlines. There is only a momentary upward flick of the eyes towards the TWA. And once Chester gets over his astonishment that anyone still uses voice technology to make airline reservations in this day and age, he takes her to the nearest computer (there is a fully outfitted UNIX machine in every room) and patches into the airline databases directly and begins searching for the optimal route back home. Randy goes and stares out the window at the chilly whitecaps slapping the mud shore and fights the urge to just stay here in Seattle, which is a town where he could be very happy. Behind him Chester and Amy keep saying “Manila,” and it sounds ridiculously exotic and hard to reach. Randy thinks that he is marginally smarter than Chester and would be even richer if he’d only stayed here.

A fast white boat comes larruping around the point from the direction of Mercer Island and banks towards him. Randy sets down his cold coffee and goes out to his car and retrieves a certain trunk—a lovely gift from a delighted Aunt Nina. It is full of certain old treasures, like his grandfather’s high school physics notebooks. He sets aside (for example) a box labeled
HARVARD-WATERHOUSE PRIME FACTOR CHALLENGE
’49-52 to reveal a stack of bricks, neatly wrapped in paper that has gone gold with age, each consisting of a short stack of ETC cards, and each labeled
ARETHUSA INTERCEPTS
with a date from 1944 or ’45. They have been in suspended animation for more than fifty years, stored on a dead medium, and now Randy is going to breathe life into them again, and maybe send them out on the Net, a few strands of fossil DNA broken out of their amber shells and released in the world again.

Probably they will fail and die, but if they flourish, it should make Randy’s life a little more interesting. Not that it’s devoid of interest now, but it is easier to introduce new complications than to resolve the old ones.

B
UNDOK IS GOOD ROCK; WHOEVER PICKED IT MUST
have known this. That basalt is so strong that Goto Dengo can carve into it any system of tunnels that he desires. As long as he observes a few basic engineering principles, he need not worry about tunnels collapsing.

Of course, cutting holes into such rock is hard work. But Captain Noda and Lieutenant Mori have provided him with an unlimited supply of Chinese laborers. At first the chatter of their drills drowns out the sounds of the jungle. Later, as they burrow into the earth, it fades to a thick tamping beat, leaving only the buzzing drone of the air compressors. Even at night they work by the dim light of lanterns, which cannot penetrate the canopy overhead. Not that MacArthur is sending observation planes over Luzon in the middle of the night, but work lights shining up on the mountain would be noticed by the lowland Filipinos.

The inclined shaft connecting the bottom of Lake Yamamoto to Golgotha is by far the longest part of the complex, but it need not have a very great diameter: just big enough for a single worker to worm his way up to the end and operate his drill. Before the lake is created, Goto Dengo has a crew dig the extreme upper end of that shaft, tunneling out and down from the riverbank with a dip angle of some twenty degrees. This excavation continually fills up with water—it is effectively a well—and removing the
waste rock is murder, because it all has to be hauled uphill. So when it has proceeded for some five meters, Goto Dengo has the opening sealed up with stones and mortar.

Then he has the latrines filled in, and the area around the lake cleared of workers. They can do nothing now but contaminate the place with evidence. Summer has arrived, the rainy season on Luzon, and he is worried that rain will find the ruts worn into the soil by the Chinese workers’ feet and turn them into gullies, impossible to conceal. But the unusually dry weather holds, and vegetation rapidly takes root on the bare ground.

Goto Dengo is faced with a challenge that would seem familiar to the designer of a garden back home: he needs to create an artificial formation that seems natural. It needs to look as though a boulder rolled down the mountain after an earthquake and wedged itself in a bottleneck of the Yamamoto River. Other rocks, and the logs of dead trees, piled up against it, forming a natural dam that created the lake.

He finds the boulder he needs sitting in the middle of the riverbed about a kilometer upstream. Dynamite would only shatter it, and so he brings in a stout crew of workers with iron levers, and they get it rolling. It goes a few meters and stops.

This is discouraging, but the workers have the idea now. Their leader is Wing—the bald Chinese man who helped Goto Dengo bury the corpse of Lieutenant Ninomiya. He has the mysterious physical strength that seems to be common among bald men, and he has a kind of mesmerizing leadership power over the other Chinese. He somehow manages to get them excited about moving the boulder. Of course, they have to move it, because Goto Dengo has let it be known that he wants it moved, and if they don’t, Lieutenant Mori’s guards will shoot them on the spot. But above and beyond this, they seem to welcome the challenge. Certainly standing in cool running water beats working down in the mineshafts of Golgotha.

The boulder is in place three days later. The water divides around it. More boulders follow, and the river begins to pool. Trees do not naturally sprout from lakes, and so Goto Dengo has workers fell the ones that are standing here—not
with axes, though. He shows them how to excavate the roots one at a time, like archaeologists digging up a skeleton, so that it looks as if the trees were uprooted during a typhoon. These are piled up against the boulders, and smaller stones and gravel follow. Suddenly the level of Lake Yamamoto begins to rise. The dam leaks, but the leaks peter out as more gravel and clay are dumped in behind it. Goto Dengo is not above plugging troublesome holes with sheets of tin, as long as it’s down where no one will ever see it. When the lake has reached its desired level, the only sign it’s manmade is a pair of wires trailing up onto its shore, rooted in demolition charges molded into the concrete plug on its bottom.

Golgotha is cut into a ridge of basalt that is flung out from the base of the mountain—like a buttress root from the trunk of a jungle tree—that separates the watersheds of the Yamamoto and Tojo Rivers. Moving southwards from the summit of Calvary, then, one would pass through the teeming bowl of its extinct crater first, over the remains of its southern rim, and then onto the gradual downward slope of a much larger mountain on which Calvary’s cinder cone is just a blemish, like a wart on a nose. The small Yamamoto River runs generally parallel to the Tojo on the other side of the basalt ridge, but descends more gradually, so that its elevation gets higher and higher above that of the Tojo River as both work their way down the mountain. At the site of Lake Yamamoto, it is fifty meters above the Tojo. By drilling the connecting tunnel in a southeasterly direction rather than straight east underneath the ridge, one can bypass a chain of rapids and a waterfall on the Tojo which drop that river’s elevation to almost a hundred meters beneath the bottom of the lake.

When The General comes to inspect the works, Goto Dengo astonishes him by taking him up the Tojo River in the same Mercedes he used to drive down from Manila. By this point, the workers have constructed a single-lane road that leads from the prison camp up the rocky bed of the river to Golgotha. “Fortune has smiled on our endeavor by giving us a dry summer,” Goto Dengo explains. “With the water low, the riverbed makes an ideal roadway—the rise in
altitude is gentle enough for the heavy trucks that we will be bringing in. When we are finished, we will create a low dam near the site that will conceal the most obvious signs of our work. When the river rises to its normal height, there will be no visible trace that men were ever here.”

“It is a good idea,” The General concedes, then mumbles something to his aide about using the same technique at the other sites. The aide nods and
hai
s and writes it down.

A kilometer into the jungle, the banks rise up into vertical walls of stone that climb higher and higher above the water’s level until they actually overhang the river. There is a hollow in the stony channel where the river broadens out; just upstream is the waterfall. At this point the road makes a left turn directly into the rock wall, and stops. Everyone gets out of the Mercedes: Goto Dengo, The General, his aide, and Captain Noda. The river runs over their feet, ankle-deep.

A mouse-hole has been dug into the rock here. It has a flat bottom and an arched ceiling. A six-year-old could stand upright in here, but anyone taller will have to stoop. A pair of iron rails runs into the opening. “The main drift,” says Goto Dengo.

“This is it?”

“The opening is small so that we can conceal it later,” Captain Noda explains, cringing, “but it gets wider inside.”

The General looks pissed off and nods. Led by Goto Dengo, all four men squat and duck-walk into the tunnel, pushed by a steady current of air. “Notice the excellent ventilation,” Captain Noda enthuses, and Goto Dengo grins proudly.

Ten meters in, they are able to stand up. Here, the drift has the same vaulted shape, but it’s six feet high and six wide, buttressed by reinforced-concrete arches that they have poured in wooden forms on the floor. The iron rails run far away into blackness. A train of three mine cars sits on them—sheet metal boxes filled with shattered basalt. “We remove waste by hand tramming,” Goto Dengo explains. “This drift, and the rails, are perfectly level, to keep the cars from running out of control.”

The General grunts. Clearly he has no respect for the intricacies of mine engineering.

“Of course, we will use the same cars to move the, er, material into the vault when it arrives,” Captain Noda says.

“Where did this waste come from?” The General demands. He is pissed off that they are still digging at this late stage.

“From our longest and most difficult tunnel—the inclined shaft to the bottom of Lake Yamamoto,” says Goto Dengo. “Fortunately, we can continue to extend that shaft even while the material is being loaded into the vault. Outgoing cars will carry waste from the shaft work, incoming cars will carry the material.”

He stops to thrust his finger into a drill hole in the ceiling. “As you can see, all of the holes are ready for the demolition charges. Not only will those charges bring down the ceiling, but they will leave the surrounding rock so rotten as to make horizontal excavation very difficult.”

They walk down the main drift for fifty meters. “We are in the heart of the ridge now,” Goto Dengo says, “halfway between the two rivers. The surface is a hundred meters straight up.” In front of them, the string of electric lights terminates in blackness. Goto Dengo gropes for a wall switch.

“The vault,” he says, and hits the switch.

The tunnel has abruptly broadened into a flat-bottomed chamber with an arched ceiling, shaped like a Quonset hut, lined with concrete, the concrete massively ribbed every couple of meters. The floor of the vault is perhaps the size of a tennis court. The only opening is a small vertical shaft rising up from the middle of the ceiling, just barely big enough to contain a ladder and a human body.

The General folds his arms and waits while the aide goes around with a tape measure, verifying the dimensions.

“We go up,” says Goto Dengo, and, without waiting for The General to bristle, mounts the ladder up into the shaft. It only goes up for a few meters, and then they are in another drift with another narrow-gauge railway on the floor. This one’s shored up with timbers hewn from the surrounding jungle.

“The haulage level, where we move rock around,” Goto Dengo explains, when they have all convened at the top of the ladder. “You asked about the waste in those cars. Let me
show you how it got there.” He leads the group down the tracks for twenty or thirty meters, past a train of battered cars. “We are headed northwest, towards Lake Yamamoto.”

They reach the end of the drift, where another narrow shaft pierces the ceiling. A fat reinforced hose runs up into it, compressed air keening out through tiny leaks. The sound of drills can be heard, from very far away. “I would not recommend that you look up this shaft, because stray rocks occasionally come down from where we are working,” he warns. “But if you looked straight up, you would see that, about ten meters above us, this shaft comes up into the floor of a narrow inclined shaft that goes uphill that way—” he motions northwest “—towards the lake, and downhill that way—” he turns a hundred and eighty degrees, back towards the vault.

“Toward the fool’s chamber,” The General says, with relish.

“Hai!”
answers Goto Dengo. “As we extend the shaft up toward the lake, we rake the broken rock downhill with an iron hoe drawn by a winch, and when it reaches the top of this vertical shaft that you see here, it falls down into waiting cars. From here we can drop it down into the main vault and from there hand-tram it to the exit.”

“What are you doing with all the waste?” asks The General.

“Spreading some of it down the riverbed, using it to make the roadway that we drove up on. Some of it is stored above to backfill various ventilation shafts. Some is being crushed into sand for a trap which I will explain later.” Goto Dengo leads them back in the direction of the main vault, but they pass by the ladder and turn into another drift, then another. Then the drifts become narrow and cramped again, like the one at the entrance. “Please forgive me for leading you into what seems like a three-dimensional maze,” Goto Dengo says. “This part of Golgotha is intentionally confusing. If a thief ever manages to break into the fool’s chamber from above, he will expect to find a drift through which the material was loaded into it. We have left one there for him to find—a false drift that seems to lead away toward the Tojo River. Actually, a whole complex of false drifts and
shafts that will all be demolished by dynamite when we are finished. It will be so difficult, not to mention dangerous, for the thief to work his way through so much rotten rock, that he will probably be satisfied with what he finds in the fool’s chamber.”

He keeps pausing and looking back at The General, expecting him to tire of this, but clearly The General is getting a second wind. Captain Noda, taking up the rear, gestures him onwards impatiently.

The maze takes some time to negotiate and Goto Dengo, like a prestidigitator, tries to fill up the time with some convincing patter. “As I’m sure you understand, shafts and drifts must be engineered to counteract lithostatic forces.”

“What?”

“They must be strong enough to support the rock overhead. Just as a building must be strong enough to hold up its own roof.”

“Of course,” says The General.

“If you have two parallel drifts, one above the other like storeys in a building, then the rock in between them—the floor or the ceiling, depending on which way you look at it—must be thick enough to support itself. In the structure we are walking through, the rock is just barely thick enough. But when the demolition charges have been set off, the rock will be shattered so that reconstructing these drifts will be a physical impossibility.”

“Excellent!” says The General, and again tells his aide to make a note of it—apparently so that the other Goto Dengos in the other Golgothas can do the same.

At one point a drift has been plugged by a wall made of rubble stuck together with mortar. Goto Dengo shines his lantern on it, lets The General see the iron rails disappearing beneath the masonry. “To a thief coming down from the fool’s chamber, this will look like the main drift,” he explains. “But if he demolishes that wall, he dies.”