"Cryptonomicon"

[fiefoe]

The highlights are still almost as much fun as the last time I read it nearly 20 years ago, and Bobby Shaftoe is a riot, but there are also large swaths of text describing things I don't care for that much, like all the shareholder meetings Randy and Avi attended. For such a doorstopper, Neal Stephenson handily fails the Bechdel test. (Randy's thing with Amy feels so... embarrassing.)

• Here you’ve got the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank of course, City Bank, Chase Manhattan, the Bank of America, and BBME and the Agricultural Bank of China and any number of crappy little provincial banks, and several of those banks have contracts with what’s left of the Chinese Government to print currency. It must be a cutthroat business because they slash costs by printing it on old newspapers, and if you know how to read Chinese, you can see last year’s news stories and polo scores peeking through the colored numbers and pictures that transform these pieces of paper into legal tender.
• They cannot even hear the honking of their own truck horn because of the wild throbbing pentatonic cacophony of coolies singing. This ain’t just your regular Friday P.M. Shanghai bank-district money-rush. This is an ultimate settling of accounts before the whole Eastern Hemisphere catches fire. The millions of promises printed on those slips of bumwad will all be kept or broken in the next ten minutes; actual pieces of silver and gold will move, or they won’t. It is some kind of fiduciary Judgment Day.
• Students were not allowed to touch the organ until they were proficient at the piano, and when this was explained to Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, he taught himself, in three weeks, how to play a Bach fugue, and signed up for organ lessons. Since he was only five years old at the time, he was unable to reach both the manuals and the pedals, and had to play standing—or rather strolling, from pedal to pedal.
• Alan and Rudy’s relationship seemed closer, or at least more multilayered, than Alan and Lawrence’s. Lawrence concluded that Alan’s penis scheme must have finally found a taker.
• 'A forest, as Kafka would imagine it,' Rudy muttered.
  By this point Lawrence had figured out that they were, in fact, in the Pine Barrens. But he didn’t know who Kafka was. 'A mathematician?' he guessed.
• 'Have you mentioned this Hilbert guy before?'
  'No, he is new to this discussion, Lawrence.'
  'Who is he?'
  'A man who asks difficult questions. He asked a whole list of them once. Gödel answered one of them.'
• 'He’s going to have an umlaut in him later tonight,' Rudy said, looking at Alan in a way that, in retrospect, years later, Lawrence would understand to have been smoldering.
• Then he broke out of the sticks and onto a perfectly flat expanse of white sand, stitched down with tufts of beach grass, and just then he was dazzled by a low fence of quiet steady flames that ran across a part of the horizon about as wide as the harvest moon when it sinks into the sea. Its brightness made it difficult to see anything else—Lawrence kept riding into little ditches and creeks that meandered across the flats. He learned not to stare directly at the flames. Looking off to the sides was more interesting anyway: the table-land was marked at wide intervals by the largest buildings he had ever seen, cracker-box structures built by Pharaohs, and in the mile-wide plazas between them, gnomons of triangulated steel were planted in wide stances: the internal skeletons of pyramids. The largest of these pierced the center of a perfectly circular railway line a few hundred feet in diameter: two argent curves scored on the dull ground, interrupted in one place where the tower’s shadow, a stopped sundial, told the time.
  a spiraling flock of alert fedoras, prodding at slim terse notebooks with stately Ticonderogas, crab-walking photogs turning their huge chrome daisies, crisp rows of people sleeping with blankets over their faces, a sweating man with Brilliantined hair chalking umlauted names on a blackboard.
  There was a suitcase spilled open, with a pair of women’s shoes displayed as if in the window of a downtown store, and a menu that had been charred to an oval glow, and then some tousled wall-slabs, like a whole room that had dropped out of the sky—these were decorated, one with a giant map of the world, great circles arcing away from Berlin to pounce on cities near and far, and another with a photograph of a famous, fat German in a uniform, grinning on a flowered platform, the giant horizon of a new Zeppelin behind him.
• So it’s Gödel’s proof all over again—if any possible combination of machine and data can be represented by a string of numbers, then you can just arrange all of the possible strings of numbers into a big table, and then it turns into a Cantor diagonal type of argument, and the answer is that there must be some numbers that cannot be computed.'
• A word about Avi: his father’s people had just barely gotten out of Prague. As Central European Jews went, they were fairly typical. The only thing about them that was really anomalous was that they were still alive. But his mother’s people were unbelievably peculiar New Mexican crypto-Jews who had been living on mesas, dodging Jesuits, shooting rattlesnakes and eating jimsonweed for three hundred years; they looked like Indians and talked like cowboys. In his relations with other people, therefore, Avi dithered. Most of the time he was courtly and correct in a way that was deeply impressive to businesspeople—Nipponese ones expecially—but there were these eruptions, from time to time, as if he’d been dipping into the loco weed.
• Shaftoe ate his morsels and then ordered some more. For perhaps ten seconds, between the taste of the fish and the sound of the poetry, he actually felt comfortable here, and forgot that he was merely instigating a vicious racial brawl.
• Purple clouds tumble out of the surrounding mountains with the palpable momentum of volcanic mudflows and turn half of the sky into a blank wall striped with vertical bolts of lightning; the walls of the hotel room flash with it as though paparazzi are working outside the window. Below, food vendors in Rizal Park run up and down the sidewalks to get out of the rain, which falls, as it has been doing for about half a millennium, on the sloping black walls of Intramuros. If those walls did not run in straight lines they could be mistaken for a natural freak of geology: ridges of bare, dark volcanic rock erupting from the grass like teeth from gums.
• If you want your secrets to remain secret past the end of your life expectancy, then, in order to choose a key length, you have to be a futurist. You have to anticipate how much faster computers will get during this time. You must also be a student of politics. Because if the entire world were to become a police state obsessed with recovering old secrets, then vast resources might be thrown at the problem of factoring large composite numbers. <> So the length of the key that you use is, in and of itself, a code of sorts.
• If nine-year-old Randy Waterhouse had been able to look into the future and see himself in this career, he would have been delighted beyond measure: the primary tool of the Interlibrary Loan Department was the Staple Remover. Young Randy had seen one of these devices in the hands of his fourth-grade teacher and been enthralled by its cunning and deadly appearance, so like the jaws of some futuristic robot dragon.
• Andy Loeb was trying to figure out what foods had historically been eaten by certain Northwest Indian tribes, how much energy they expended to get these foods and how much they obtained by eating them. He wanted to do this calculation for coastal Indians like the Salish (who had easy access to seafood) and for inland ones like the Cayuse (who didn’t) as part of an extremely convoluted plan to prove some sort of point about the relative standards of living of these tribes and how this affected their cultural development (coastal tribes made lots of fantastically detailed art and inland ones occasionally scratched stick figures on rocks).
• Later, he was to decide that Andrew’s life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.
• It is terrible to see—some training exercise gone miserably awry. But they pull out of their suicidal trajectories in plenty of time. The bits that have fallen off of them plunge smoothly and purposefully, not tumbling and fluttering as chunks of debris would. They are coming down all over the place. Perversely, they all seem to be headed for the berthed ships. It is incredibly dangerous—they might hit someone! Lawrence is outraged.
• Worse yet, he has a full beard, which makes him feel dreadfully incorrect whenever he ventures out with her. He proposed to Charlene that perhaps he should issue a press release stating that he shaves the rest of his body every day. She did not think it was very funny. He realized, when he was halfway over the Pacific Ocean, that all of her work was basically an elaborate prophecy of the doom of their relationship.
• Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war-ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits (i.e., Charlene’s friends), had actually done a lot for Randy’s peace of mind over the years.
• --Randy had ruined his relationship with Charlene by wanting to have kids. Kids raise issues. Charlene, like all of her friends, couldn’t handle issues. Issues meant disagreement. Voicing disagreement was a form of conflict. Conflict, acted out openly and publicly, was a male mode of social interaction—the foundation for patriarchal society which brought with it the usual litany of dreadful things. Regardless, Randy decided to get patriarchal with Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik.
  -- 'I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped as a technocrat,' Randy said, deliberately using oppressed-person’s language, maybe in an attempt to turn their weapons against them but more likely (he thinks, lying in bed at three A.M. in the Manila Hotel) out of an uncontrollable urge to be a prick. Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed.
• He remembers Nanking, and what the Nips did there. What happened to the women.
• He prods like a doctor and prays like a priest—in Latin, even. Silver hair buzzed close to a tanned skull. Shaftoe scans the fellow’s clothing for some kind of insignia. He’s hoping to see a Semper Fidelis but instead he reads: Societas Eruditorum and Ignoti et quasi occulti.
  'Ignoti et . . . what the fuck does that mean?' he asks.
  'Hidden and unknown—more or less,'
• 'I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago,' Avi says. 'They have plastic forests there!' 'What does that mean?' <> 'Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags out of the air. They get totally covered with them. The trees die because light and air can’t get through to the leaves. But they remain standing, totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors.'
• The American man is blond and has a hard-jawed quasi-military look about him. He seems alert, disciplined, impassive, which Charlene’s crowd would interpret as hostility born of repression born of profound underlying mental disorder.
• Ronald Reagan has a stack of three-by-five cards in his lap. He skids up a new one: 'What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young Marines on their way to Guadalcanal?'
• he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process. The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order I’m not going to bother you with any of the details—and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer’s shoulders by the subordinate’s unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.
• They studied his mating habits like entomologists watching the reproductive habits of ants. They groomed Victoria Vigo—their ace, their bombshell, their sexual Terminator—to give Kepler exactly what Kepler wanted. Then they sent her into his life like a guided fucking missile and pow! true love.'
• 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.
• 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.
• 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. .. 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.
• So the cover story du jour, freshly spun by Lieutenant Ethridge, is that Detachment 2702 is (contrary to all outward appearances) an elite, crack medical team concerned that Hott had been struck down by a rare new form of North African food poisoning. Maybe even something deliberately left behind by the French, who are, by accounts, a little irritable about having their battleship sunk.
• 'Hey!' Ethridge says. 'I thought you were going to do the gloves last.'
  'Sir, we’re doing them first, by your leave, sir!' Bobby Shaftoe says. 'On account of his fingers will thaw out first and once that happens we are screwed, sir!'
  'Well, slap this on him first,' Ethridge says, and hands over a wrist watch. Shaftoe hefts it and whistles. It’s a beaut: a Swiss chronometer in solid uranium, its jewel-laden movement throbbing away like the heart beat of a small mammal.
• Sergeant Shaftoe, however, now understands that anything to do with this detachment is liable to be way off to one side, shrouded in black tarps and awnings. Like any other military unit, Detachment 2702 is rich in some supplies and poor in others, but they do appear to control about fifty percent of last year’s total U.S. tarpage production.
• The Nipponese Army is still trying to work out some way to kill, say, a hundred American Marines without losing, say, five hundred of its own soldiers. <> The Japanese Navy is a different story—they know what they are doing. They have Yamamoto. They have torpedoes that actually explode when they strike their targets, in stark contrast to the American models which do nothing but scratch the paint of the Japanese ships and then sink apologetically.
• There are 100 German U-boats in the Atlantic now, operating mostly from Lorient and Bordeaux, and they are slaughtering convoys in the North Atlantic with such efficiency that it’s not even combat, just a Lusitanian-level murder spree. They are on a pace to sink something like a million tons of shipping this month,... He tries to think of a ton as being roughly equivalent to a car, and then tries to imagine America and Canada going out into the middle of the Atlantic and simply dropping a million cars into the ocean—just in November.
• 'Something to do with cranks,' Waterhouse ventures, feeling a little defensive.
  'I don’t know that I agree,' Alan says.
  'Just stipulate it—think of it as a boundary condition,' Waterhouse says. But Alan is already hard at work, he suspects, mentally designing a rotary aircraft engine with an even number of cylinders.
• 'Hut' makes him think of a tiny thing, but these huts, taken together, are more like that new Pentagon thing that the War Department has been putting up across the river from D.C. They embody a blunt need for space unfiltered through any aesthetic or even human considerations.
• SOCIETY FOR THE UNIFICATION OF HINDUISM AND ISLAM
  ANGLO-LAPP SOLIDARITY SOCIETY
  FULMINANTS ASSOCIATION
  CHIANG TZSE MUTUAL BENEVOLENT SOCIETY
  ROYAL COMMITTEE ON MITIGATION OF MARINE CRANKSHAFT WEAR
  BOLGER DAMSELFLY PROPAGATION FOUNDATION
  ANTI-WELCH LEAGUE
  COMITY FOR ØE REFORMASHUN OF ENGLISH ORØOGRAFY
  SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO VERMIN
  CHURCH OF VEDANTIC ETHICAL QUANTUM CONSCIOUSNESS
  IMPERIAL MICA BOARD
  At first he mistakes Qwghlm House for the world’s tiniest and most poorly located department store. It has a bow window that looms over the sidewalk like the thrusting ram of a trireme, embarnacled with Victorian foofawfery, and housing a humble display: a headless mannequin dressed in something that appears to have been spun from steel wool (perhaps a tribute to wartime austerity?);
• He finds it shocking that in a country actively embroiled in the middle of the greatest war in history—in a country run by belligerent Fascists for God’s sake—two truckloads of heavily armed enemy soldiers can just drive around freely, protected by nothing except a couple of five-dollar tarps. Criminy! What kind of a sorry operation is this?
• An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.
• But then one summer he worked in a mill where they had a bandsaw. The bandsaw, its supply of blades, its spare parts, maintenance supplies, special tools and manuals occupied a whole room. It was the only tool he had ever seen with infrastructure... Anyway, the most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but it didn’t seem to notice that it was doing anything.
  But the Vickers in the back of this truck was to other guns as the bandsaw was to other saws. The Vickers was water-cooled. It actually had a fucking radiator on it. It had infrastructure, just like the bandsaw, and a whole crew of technicians to fuss over it.
• (U-boats): now here he is, inside one of the most famous killing machines in the whole war, and what does he see? He sees valves. Or rather the cast-iron wheels that are used for opening and closing valves. Entire bulkheads are covered with iron wheels, ranging from a couple of inches to over a foot in diameter, packed in as densely as barnacles on a rock, in what looks like a completely random and irregular fashion.
• Randy is about to say I go through laptops like a transvestite goes through nylons though maybe like a high-speed drill through a necrotic molar would be more thematically apropos,
• 'Yes, sir,' Robson says precisely. 'To the safe.'
  'Oh!' Waterhouse says. He is faintly irritated that they would ask him this question. There seems little point in writing down the combination when the equipment needed to break into the safe is sitting right there. It is much more important to have a safe-breaking algorithm than to have one particular solution to a safe-breaking problem. 'I don’t know,' he says. 'I forgot.'
• And then the bomb rises up out of the water again. Goto Dengo, a student of engineering, implores the laws of physics to take hold of this thing and make it fall and sink, which is what big dumb pieces of metal are supposed to do. Eventually it does fall again—but then it rises up again. <> It is skipping across the water like the flat rocks that the boys of Kulu used to throw across the fish pond near the village. Goto Dengo watches it skip several more times, utterly fascinated. Once again, the fortunes of war have provided a bizarre spectacle, seemingly for no other reason than to entertain him. He savors it as if it were a cigarette discovered in the bottom of a pocket. Skip, skip, skip.
• The Americans have invented a totally new bombing tactic in the middle of a war and implemented it flawlessly. His mind staggers like a drunk in the aisle of a careening train. They saw that they were wrong, they admitted their mistake, they came up with a new idea. The new idea was accepted and embraced all the way up the chain of command. Now they are using it to kill their enemies. <> No warrior with any concept of honor would have been so craven. So flexible.
• This is what Yamamoto thinks about, shortly before sunrise, as he clambers onto his Mitsubishi G4M bomber in Rabaul, the scabbard of his sword whacking against the frame of the narrow door. The Yanks call this type of plane 'Betty,' an effeminatizing gesture that really irks him. Then again, the Yanks name even their own planes after women, and paint naked ladies on their sacred instruments of war! If they had samurai swords, Americans would probably decorate the blades with nail polish.
• If he would just work with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought. As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas in the physical world. The underlying math of the universe is like the light streaming in through the window. Alan is not satisfied with merely knowing that it streams in. He blows smoke into the air to make the light visible. He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and flowers, tracing the mathematical patterns in their structure, and he dreams about electron winds blowing over the glowing filaments and screens of radio tubes, and, in their surges and eddies, capturing something of what is going on in his own brain. Turing is neither a mortal nor a god. He is Antaeus. That he bridges the mathematical and physical worlds is his strength and his weakness.
• It was said that loose curls of walnut and oak from Gomer Bolstroods block plane had been used as tinder beneath the pyres of convicted witches.
• 'The People’s Liberation Army is a titanic business empire,' Beryl says. 'They control the biggest pharmaceutical company in China. The biggest hotel chain. A lot of the communications infrastructure. Railways. Refineries. And, obviously, armaments.'
• 'Oh, well,' the German mutters, 'I was just trying to make conversation.' He turns his head and scratches his nose by nuzzling his pillow for a while. 'You can tell me any secret you want,' he says. 'See, I’ve already notified Dönitz that the Enigma is shit. And it made no difference. Except he ordered me a new overcoat. The man rolls over, exposing his back to Shaftoe. The sleeves of the garment are sewn shut at the ends and tied together behind his back. 'It is more comfortable than you would think, for the first day or two.'
  ...
  'Under no circumstances,' Beck says, 'am I to extract any more information from you.'
  'What the hell does that mean?'
  'Probably that you know something I am not authorized to know,' Beck says.


• 'Yeah. I was just wondering,' Shaftoe says turning to the skipper, 'you have any gold on this U-boat?'
  'The yellow metal?'
  'Yeah. Bars of it.'
  The captain is still nonplussed. Shaftoe is beginning to feel a certain mischievous satisfaction. Playing with officers’ minds isn’t as good as having a brain saturated with highly refined opiates, but it will do in a pinch. 'I thought all these U-boats carried it,' he says.
• Beck summons the medic again, and the medic gives him the rest of the syringe. Shaftoe’s never felt better. What a fucking deal! He’s getting morphine out of the Germans in exchange for telling them German military secrets.
• Destroyers drop depth charges on them for eight hours. Bischoff takes a nap. When he wakes up, depth charges are booming all over the place and everything is fine. It should be dark and stormy up there now: bad weather for Catalinas. He evades the destroyers by (in a nutshell) doing clever things he has learned the hard way. The U-boat is as thin as a knitting needle, and when you turn it directly toward or away from the source of a ping, it makes almost no reflection.
• 'The prisoner Shaftoe wishes to speak to you,' says Beck, who has gone back to being his second-in-command, as if nothing had ever been different. War gives men good ignoring skills.
• The story then bogs down for a while because there are no more Germans to kill, and Shaftoe, sensing that Bischoff’s attention is beginning to wander, tries to inject some lurid thrills into the narrative by describing the progress of the gangrene up the leg of the officer who ran afoul of the ax (who, as far as Bischoff can make out, was under suspicion as a possible German spy). Shaftoe keeps encouraging Root to jump in and tell the story of how Root performed several consecutive amputations of the officer’s leg, all the way up to the pelvis. Just as Bischoff is finally starting to actually care about this poor bastard with the gangrenous leg, the story takes another zigzag: they reach a little fishing town on the Gulf of Bothnia. The gangrenous officer is delivered into the hands of the town doctor. Shaftoe and his comrades hole up in the woods and strike up what sounds like an edgy relationship with a Finnish smuggler and his lissome daughter. And now it’s clear that Shaftoe has reached his favorite part of the story, which is this Finnish girl.
• His favorite thing about them is their compulsive need to educate everyone around them, all the time. Randy does not need to know anything about the ROV, but Doug Shaftoe is going to give him a short course anyway. Randy supposes that when you are in a war, practical knowledge is a good thing to spread around.
• In other circumstances, the religious reference would make Randy uncomfortable, but here it seems like the only appropriate thing to say. Think what you will about religious people, they always have something to say at times like this. What would an atheist come up with? Yes, the organisms inhabiting that submarine must have lost their higher neural functions over a prolonged period of time and eventually turned into pieces of rotten meat. So what?
• The last time he was in California, before Pearl Harbor, he was no different from all of those guys on the pier—just a little smarter, with a knack for numbers and music. But now he understands the war in a way that they never will. He is still wearing the same uniform, but only as a disguise. He believes now that the war, as those guys understand it, is every bit as fictional as the war movies being turned out across town in Hollywood. <> They say that Patton and MacArthur are daring generals; the world watches in anticipation of their next intrepid sortie behind enemy lines. Waterhouse knows that Patton and MacArthur, more than anything else, are intelligent consumers of Ultra/Magic. They use it to figure out where the enemy has concentrated his forces, then loop around them and strike where he is weakest. That’s all.
• Waterhouse knows that those little islands, before the war, had only one economic function: information processing. The dots and dashes traveling along the undersea cable are swallowed up by the earth currents after a few thousand miles, like ripples in heavy surf. The European powers colonized those islands at about the same time as the long cables were being laid, and constructed power stations where the dots and dashes coming down the line were picked up, amplified, and sent on to the next chain of islands.
• In the end, they find a Nipponese outpost by simply following the sound of the explosions. They may not have maps, but the American Fifth Air Force does.
• --'You sure don’t fuck like a smart girl,' says Bobby Shaftoe, his voice suffused with awe.
• It is October and the days are growing short. Shaftoe and Bischoff, both mired in the yet-to-be-discovered emotional dumps of Seasonal Affective Disorder, are like two brothers trapped in the same pit of quicksand, each keeping a sharp eye on the other...
  'I need an adventure like Hitler needs an ugly little toothbrush mustache,' says Bobby Shaftoe. But he drags himself up out of his chair and follows Bischoff out the door.
• It takes Shaftoe a long time to stretch his mind around this large, inconveniently shaped concept. Bischoff, in typical European fashion, seems completely unruffled. But he still has questions to ask. 'Enoch, why are you . . . here?'
  'Why has my spirit been incarnated into a physical body in this world generally? Or specifically, why am I here in a Swedish forest, standing on the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs over the cremated remains of his Italian lover?
• that is what pisses Randy off, and has always pissed him off, about dancing lessons. Any moron can learn to trudge through the basic steps. That takes all of half an hour. But when that half-hour is over, dancing instructors always expect you’ll take flight and go through one of those miraculous time lapse transitions that happen only in Broadway musicals and begin dancing brilliantly. Randy supposes that people who are lousy at math feel the same way: the instructor writes a few simple equations on the board, and ten minutes later he’s deriving the speed of light in a vacuum.
• Then it’s through the big doors and into the ballroom, where, beneath swirling, colored lights, hundreds of Filipinas are dancing, mostly with much younger men, to the strains of a reprocessed Carpenters tune generated by a small orchestra in the corner.
• 'Why did you mention crypto, then?' Amy asks. She has some kind of emotional metal detector that screams whenever it comes near buried assumptions and hastily stifled impulses.
• The AIB people, on the other hand, remind Waterhouse very much of those Detachment 2702 fellows: tense, tanned, and taciturn.
• the silvery Nordic light coming in through the tiny windows of Enoch Root’s church cellar glances from the planes of his face so as to highlight an interesting terrain of big pores, premature creases, and old dueling scars.
• I was moved into Referat Iva of Gruppe IV, Analytical Cryptanalysis, which was part of Hauptgruppe B, Cryptanalysis, which reported ultimately to Major General Erich Feilgiebel, Chief of Wehrmachtnachrichtungenverbindungen.'
  Shaftoe looks around at the others, but none of them laughs, or even grins. They must not have heard it. 'Come again?' Shaftoe asks, proddingly, like a man in a bar trying to get a shy friend to tell a sure-fire thigh-slapper.
  'Wehrmachtnachrichtungenverbindungen,' von Hacklheber says, very slowly, as if repeating nursery rhymes to a toddler.
• 'I learned, through some of our agents in the British Isles, that a man matching the general description of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse had been stationed to a castle in Outer Qwghlm. I was able to arrange for a young lady to place this man under the closest possible surveillance,' he says dryly.
• 'I was convinced that the one-time pads of Detachment 2702 would have a frequency distribution similar to that of the King James Version of the Bible, for example. And I strongly suspected that the content of those messages would include words such as Waterhouse, Turing, Enigma, Qwghlm, Malta.
• But now it is 1942, almost 1943, and everyone is afraid of the Gestapo. Everyone. More than they are of the dark. So, why don’t you work during the daytime? You are stuck in a rut.'
• 'I think we should form a secret conspiracy,' says Rudolf von Hacklheber offhandedly, as if proposing to go in together on a fifth of bourbon. 'We should all make our way separately to Manila and, once we arrive, we should take some, if not all, of the gold that the Nazis and the Nipponese have been hoarding there.'
• * Readers who devote a few moments' consideration to the subject of excreta need not be pounded over the head vis-a-vis what flies, sprays, drips, etc. from such vehicles either. The Pig Truck Incident was a humorous demonstration of applied hydrodynamics, though since no actual water was involved perhaps 'excretodynamics' or 'scatodynamics' might better fit.
  At this point, having devoted much time to detailed Pig Truck description I will elide various details concerning San Juan, its inhabitants (of various taxonomic phyla some of which I had never encountered until that night), the character-building nature of our lodgings and, in particular, their fanciful plumbing system which was a credit to the imagination, though not the hydrostatic acumen, of its anonymous creator.
  Distance covered from San Juan was pathetic from cartographic p.o.v., but in terms of unexpected hassles creatively surmounted, wrenchingly difficult decisions made, & pits of despair climbed out of by the emotional fingernails, should be considered magnificent achievement on par with any given day of the Lewis & Clark expedition, (excluding, of course, anomalous days such as their first encounters with Ursus horribilis
  Q: Is the situation basically impossible then?
  A: It is basically impossible.
  Q: Then what was the point of the whole exercise?
  A: To come full circle to the first thing DMS said. It was to send us a message.
  Q: What is the message?
  A: That money is not worth having if you can't spend it.
• The Swedes stand with arms folded for a minute or so, regarding this apparition. Then they make some kind of collective decision that it does not exist, that nothing has happened here. They turn their backs, pad grumpily into their houses, begin to boil coffee. Being neutral is no less strange, no less fraught with awkward compromises, than being a belligerent. Unlike most of Europe, they can rest assured that the Germans are not here to invade them or sink their ships. On the other hand, the vessel’s presence is a violation of their sovereign territory and they ought to run down there with pitchforks and flintlocks and fight the Huns off. On the third hand, this boat was probably made out of Swedish iron.
• Shaftoe has the presence of mind to break eye contact with the chilly German. He grins and nods back. This conspiracy thing is going to be a real pain in the ass if it means backing down from casual fistfights.
• Shaftoe says. 'Besides, she might be pregnant with one of our kids. Yours, mine, or Günter’s.'
  'We, the conspiracy, have an obligation to look after our offspring,' Root agrees. 'We could establish a trust fund for them in London.'
• Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.
• He has this whole organ visualized in his head now, and while he is pounding through to the end of the figure, the top of his skull comes off, the filtered red light pours in, he sees the entire machine in his mind, as if in an exploded draftsman’s view. Then it transforms itself into a slightly different machine—an organ that runs on electricity, with ranks of vacuum tubes here, and a grid of relays there. He has the answer, now, to Turing’s question, the question of how to take a pattern of binary data and bury it into the circuitry of a thinking machine so that it can be later disinterred.
• '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.'
  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.
• 'If the air pressure in the organ pipe is high, it pushes the mercury down a little bit. If it’s low, it sucks the mercury up. I put an electrical contact into each U-tube—just a couple of wires separated by an air gap. If those wires are high and dry (like because high air pressure in the organ pipe is shoving the mercury down away from them), no current flows. But if they are immersed in the mercury (because low air pressure in the organ pipe is sucking the mercury up to cover them), then current flows between them, because mercury conducts electricity! So the U-tubes produce a set of binary digits that is like a picture of the standing wave—a graph of the harmonics that make up the musical note that is being played on the speaker. We feed that vector back to the oscillator circuit that is driving the speaker, so that the vector of bits keeps refreshing itself forever, unless the machine decides to write a new pattern of bits into it.'
• Each car has become the first cause of a system of wakes and standing vortices that extends downstream for hundreds of yards. The wind here is a glinting abrasive thing, a perpetual, face-shredding, eyeball-poking tendency in the fabric of spacetime, inhabited by vast platinum-blond arcs of fire that are centered on the low winter sun. Crystalline water is suspended in it all the time, is why: shards of ice that are smaller than snowflakes—probably just individual legs of snowflakes that have been sheared off and borne into the air as the wind snapped and rattled over the crests of Canadian snow-dunes.
• Randy rejoins his aunt at the Origin. Uncle Red has been explaining to her, somewhat condescendingly, that they must pay careful attention to the distribution of items on the economic scale, and for his troubles he has been sent on a long, lonely walk down the +x axis carrying the complete silver tea service. 'Why couldn’t we just have stayed inside and worked this all out on paper?' Aunt Nina asks.
  'It was felt that there was value in physically moving this stuff around, giving people a direct physical analog of the value-assertions that they were making,'
• So, I know a little about astronomy, a lot about computers, a little about business, and I have, if I may say so, a slightly higher level of social functioning than the others. Or maybe it’s not even functioning, just an acute awareness of when I’m not functioning, so that I at least know when to feel embarrassed.'
  Amy laughs. 'You’re definitely good at that. It seems like you sort of lurch from one moment of feeling embarrassed to the next.'
• Driving over the Cascades produces a climatic transition that would normally require a four-hour airplane flight. Warm rain spatters the wind shield and loosens the rinds of ice on the wipers. The gradual surprises of March and April are compressed into a terse executive summary. It is about as tantalizing as a strip-tease video played on fast-forward.
• The data were very nearly random. Finding patterns in them was like trying to read a book that had been burned, and its ashes mixed with all the cement that went into the Hoover Dam. We never got anything that was worth a damn.
• 'First a disclaimer: I’ve been out of circulation for a while. Have not picked up the postmodern unwillingness to make value judgments.'
  'My advice: do try to build the best Crypt you possibly can. Your clients—some of them, anyway—are, for all practical purposes, aborigines. They will either make you rich or kill you, like something straight out of a Joseph Campbell footnote.'
• 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.
• But as he is kicking up the narrow shaft, pushing frantically on the feet of Wing, who is above him and not going as fast as he would like, he feels a growing panic in his lungs. Finally he understands that he must fight the urge to hold his breath—that his lungs are filled with air at a much higher pressure than the water around him, and that if he doesn’t let some of that air out, his chest will explode. So against his instinct to save that precious air, he lets it boil out of his mouth.
• And this all fits very well with the modern way of thinking about stuff in which all you need to do, in order to attain a sense of personal accomplishment and earn the accolades of your peers, is to demonstrate an ability to slot new examples of things into the proper intellectual pigeon-holes. <> But the gap between demonstrating the vulnerability of a cryptosystem in the abstract, and actually breaking a bunch of messages written in that cryptosystem, is as wide, and as profound, as the gap between being able to criticize a film (e.g., by slotting it into a particular genre or movement) and being able to go out into the world with a movie camera and a bunch of unexposed film and actually make one.
• Shaftoe recognizes him; there’s only one Nip who could throw a grenade like that. He lies there for a few moments, counting syllables on his fingers, then stands up, cups his hands around his mouth, and hollers:
  Pineapple fastball—
  Guns of Manila applaud—
  Hit by pitch—free base!
• 'Haven’t you guys figured out yet that banzai charges DON’T FUCKING WORK?'
  'All of the people who learned that were killed in banzai charges,' Goto Dengo says.
• 'I apologize for that, sir,' Bobby Shaftoe says hastily, 'and for all of those other things that you mentioned. But I still think of myself as a Marine, and Marines do not make excuses, so I will not even try.'
  'That is not satisfactory! I need an explanation for where you’ve been.'
  'I have been out in the world,' Bobby Shaftoe says, 'getting butt-fucked by Fortune.'


• He can feel it come alive in his hand, the thrumming animal fizz of its inner fuse. He drops it into the air shaft: a circular pipe straight down, a black disk centered on a field of dingy grey, like the ashes of a Nipponese flag.
• -- Randy’s had a few girlfriends in his life—not many—but all of them were like oral surgeons who just couldn’t cut the mustard. Amy’s the only one who had the skill and the sheer balls to just look at him and say 'okay' and then tunnel into his skull and come back with the goods.
• if you were to have a conversation with an ancient Greek person, and he started talking about Zeus, you might—once you got over your initial feelings of superiority—discover that you had some mental representations inside your own mind that, though you didn’t name them Zeus and didn’t think of them as a big hairy thunderbolt-hurling son of a Titan, nonetheless had been generated as a result of interactions with entities in the outside world that are the same as the ones that cause the Zeus Representation to appear in the Greek’s mind. And here we could talk about the Plato’s Cave thing for a while—the Veg-O-Matic of metaphors—it slices! it dices!'
• it’s clear that they are being held up in opposition to the kind of mindless, raging violence associated with Ares and his offspring—Heracles even personally rids the world of a few of Ares’s psychopathic sons. I mean, the records aren’t totally clear—it’s not like you can go to the Thebes County Courthouse and look up the death certificates on these guys—
  Athena/Hephaestus is sort of an interesting coupling in that he is another technology god. Metals, metallurgy, and fire were his specialties
  'One of the first kings of Athens. You know what he was famous for?' 'Tell me.' 'Invented the chariot—and introduced the use of silver as a currency.'
• 'That is right. And in the case of Trickster gods the pattern is that cunning people tend to attain power that un-cunning people don’t. And all cultures are fascinated by this. Some of them, like many Native Americans, basically admire it, but never couple it with technological development. Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the Devil.'
  'Hence the strange love-hate relationship that Americans have with hackers.'...
  'In some cultures. The Vikings—to judge from their mythology—would instinctively hate hackers. But something different happened with the Greeks. The Greeks liked their geeks. That’s how we get Athena.'
• 'Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena.'
• Finally he puts on his artilleryman’s ear protectors and lets the Digital Computer howl through the calculation.
• Nausea wraps around Goto Dengo like a wet bedsheet. 'They would have to tunnel down through a thousand fresh corpses. It is a grave.'
  'The whole world is a grave,' says Enoch Root. 'Graves can be moved, corpses reinterred. Decently.'
• Bischoff, Rudy, Enoch, and Goto Dengo join into a knot, practically on top of Bobby Shaftoe’s grave.
  It is a shame. Waterhouse knew Bobby Shaftoe, and would have liked to attend his funeral standing up—not skulking around like this. But Enoch Root and Rudy would both recognize him. Waterhouse is their enemy.
  Or is he? In a decade full of Hitlers and Stalins, it’s hard to worry about a conspiracy that seemingly includes a priest, and that risks its very existence in order to attend a member’s funeral.
• But in the V-Million, this swimming rocket, the only weapon is secrecy. In the Baltic, fine. But this is the Mindoro Strait, which is an ocean of window-glass. V-Million might as well be suspended in midair from piano wires, searchlights crossing on it.