Cryptonomicon

  In the Bubble, the air pressure was nine or ten atmospheres. Here in the first chamber, it’s more like five. But there’s not much air in this one—just enough to let them breathe for fifteen or twenty minutes, and bleed nitrogen out of their tissues, and get lungfuls of air for the next leg of the swim.

  “Okay,” Goto Dengo says, “we go.” He finds Rodolfo in the darkness and slaps him encouragingly on the shoulder. Rodolfo takes a series of deep breaths, getting ready, and Goto Dengo recites the numbers that they all know by heart: “Twenty-five strokes straight. Then the tunnel bends up. Forty strokes up a steep hill. Where the tunnel bends again, you go straight up to the next air chamber.”

  Rodolfo nods, crosses himself, and then does a somersault in the water and kicks himself downwards. Then goes Bong, then Wing, and finally Goto Dengo.

  This leg is very long. The last fifteen meters is a vertical ascent into the air chamber. Goto Dengo had hoped that the natural buoyancy of their bodies would make this easy, even if they were on the verge of drowning. 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. He hopes that the bubbles will pass by the faces of the men above him and give them the idea too. But shortly after he does it, they all stop moving entirely.

  For perhaps ten seconds Goto Dengo is trapped in total darkness in a water-filled vertical hole in the rock that is not much wider than his own body. Of all the things he has experienced in the war, this is the worst. But just as he gives up and prepares to die, they begin moving again. They are half dead when they get to the breathing chamber.

  If Goto Dengo’s calculations were right, then the pressure in here should be no more than two or three atmospheres. But he is beginning to doubt those calculations. When he has breathed in enough air to restore full consciousness, he’s aware of sharp pains in his knees, and it’s clear from the sounds that the others are making that they are suffering the same way.

  “This time we wait as long as we can,” he says.

  The next leg is shorter, but it’s made more difficult by the pain in their knees. Again Rodolfo goes first. But when Goto Dengo rises up into the next air chamber, about one and a half atmospheres above normal, only Bong and Wing are there.

  “Rodolfo missed the opening,” Bong says. “I think he went too far—up the ventilation shaft!”

  Goto Dengo nods. Only a few meters beyond where they turned into this passage is a ventilation shaft that goes all the way to the surface. It has a sharp sideways jog in the middle that Goto put there so that when Captain Noda filled it up with rubble (which he has presumably done by now), the diagonal tunnel—their escape route—would not be blocked. If Rodolfo went up that shaft, he found a cul-de-sac, with no air bubble in the top.

  Goto Dengo doesn’t have to tell the others that Rodolfo is dead. Bong crosses himself and says a prayer. Then they stay for a while and take advantage of the air that Rodolfo should be sharing. The pain in Goto Dengo’s knees becomes sharper, but after a while it plateaus.

  “From here, only small changes in altitude, not much need to decompress. Mostly we swim for distance now,” he says. They still have more than three hundred horizontal meters to cover, pierced with four more shafts for air. The last of these doubles as a legitimate ventilation shaft.

  So from there on it is just swimming and resting, swimming and resting, until finally the walls of the tunnel peel away from them and they find themselves in Lake Yamamoto.

  Goto Dengo breaks the surface and does nothing for a long time but tread water and breathe clean air. It is nighttime, and for the first time in a year, Bundok is quiet, except for the sound of Bong, kneeling on the shore of the lake, making the sign of the cross and mumbling prayers as fast as his lips can move.

  Wing has already departed, without so much as a good-bye. This is shocking to Goto Dengo until he realizes what it means: he, too, is free to go. As far as the world knows, he is dead, all of his obligations discharged. For the first time in his life, he can do whatever he wants.

  He swims to the shore, gets up on his feet, and starts walking. His knees hurt. He cannot believe that he has come through all of this, and his only problem is sore knees.

  BUST

  * * *

  “KOPI,” RANDY SAYS to the flight attendant, then reconsiders, remembering that he is in steerage this time, and getting to a toilet might not be so easy. It’s just a little Malaysian Air 757. The flight attendant sees the indecision on his face and wavers. Her face is framed in a gaudy, vaguely Islamic scarf that is the most tokenistic nod to sexual modesty he has ever seen. “Kopi nyahkafeina,” Randy says, and she beams and pours from the orange carafe. It is not that she doesn’t speak English, just that Randy is starting to feel comfortable with the local pidgin. He realizes that this is the first step in a long process that will eventually turn him into one of these cheerful, burly, sunburned expats who infest the airport bars and Shangri-La hotels of the Rim.

  Outside his window, the long slender isle of Palawan lies parallel to their flight path. A fogbound pilot could almost get from Kinakuta to Manila by following Palawan’s beaches, but that is a moot point on a day like this. Those beaches slope gradually into the transparent waters of the South China Sea. When you’re down there planted in the sand, looking at a glancing angle across the waves, it probably doesn’t look like much, but from up here you can see straight down through the water for many fathoms, and so all of the islands, and even the coral heads, have skirts that start out dark brown or dun near the water and blend into yellow and finally into swimming-pool blue before eventually fading into the deep blue of the ocean. Every little coral head and sandbar looks like the iridescent eye on a peacock’s plume.

  After the conversation at Tom Howard’s last night, Randy slept in his guest room and then spent most of the day in Kinakuta buying a new laptop, complete with a new hard drive, and transferring all of the data from the drive he salvaged in Los Altos onto the new one, encrypting everything in the process. Considering all of the completely boring and useless corporate documents he has subjected to state-of-the-art encryption, he can’t believe he carried the Arethusa stuff around on his hard drive, unencrypted, for several days, and across a couple of national borders. Not to mention the original ETC punch-cards, which now reside in Tom Howard’s basement safe. Of course that stuff is encrypted to begin with, but that was done in 1945, and so by modern standards it might as well have been enciphered with a cereal-box decoder ring. Or at least that is what Randy is kind of hoping. Another thing he did this morning was to download the current version of the Cryptonomicon from the ftp server where it lives in San Francisco. Randy’s never looked at it in detail, but he has heard it contains samples of code, or at least algorithms, that he could use to attack Arethusa. With luck, the very latest public code-breaking techniques in the Cryptonomicon might match up to the classified technology that Pontifex and his colleagues were employing at the NSA thirty years ago. Those techniques didn’t work against the Arethusa messages that they were trying to decrypt, but this was probably only because those messages were random numbers—not the real messages. Now that Randy has what he suspects are the real messages, he may be able to accomplish what Earl Comstock tried and failed to do during the fifties.

  They are angling across the terminator—not the robotic assassin of moviedom, but the line between night and day through which our planet incessantly rotates. Looking east, Randy can see over the rim of the world to places where it is dusk, and the clouds catch only the reddest fraction of the sun’s light, squatting in darkness but glowing with sullen contained fire like coals in their feathery ruffs of as
h. The airplane is still in the daylight, and is assiduously tracked by mysterious bars of rainbow, little spectral doppelgangers—probably some new NSA surveillance technology. Some of the Palawan’s rivers run blue and straight into the ocean and some carry enormous plumes of eroded silt that feather out into the ocean and are swept up the shore by currents. In Kinakuta there is less deforestation than there is here, but only because they have oil instead. All of these countries are burning resources at a fantastic rate to get their economies stoked up, gambling that they’ll be able to make the jump into hyperspace—some kind of knowledge economy, presumably—before they run out of stuff to sell and turn into Haiti.

  Randy is paging his way through the opening sections of the Cryptonomicon, but he can never concentrate when he’s on an airplane. The opening sections are stolen pages from World War II-era military manuals. These used to be classified until ten years ago, when one of Cantrell’s friends found copies just sitting in a library in Kentucky and drove there with a shitload of dimes and photocopied them. That got public, civilian cryptanalysis up to where the government was in the 1940s. The Xeroxes have been scanned and OCRed and converted to the HTML format used for Web pages so that people can put in links and marginal notes and annotations and corrections without messing with the original text, and this they have done enthusiastically, which is all very well but makes it hard to read. The original text is set in a deliberately crabbed, old-fashioned typeface to make it instantly distinguishable from the cyber-era annotations. The introduction to the Cryptonomicon was written, probably before Pearl Harbor, by a guy named William Friedman, and is filled with aphorisms probably intended to keep neophyte code-breakers from slapping grenades to their heads after a long week of wrestling with the latest Nipponese machine ciphers.

  The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized.

  Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous days of labor were unable to reveal.

  And, Randy’s favorite,

  As to luck, there is the old miners’ proverb: “Gold is where you find it.”

  So far so good, but then with a few whacks of the Page Down key Randy’s looking at endless staggered grids of random letters (some kind of predigital method for solving ciphers) which the author would not have put into the document if they did not convey some kind of useful lesson to the reader. Randy is miserably aware that until he has learned to read through these grids he will not even be up to the level of competence of a World War II novice cryptanalyst. The sample messages used are like ONE PLANE REPORTED LOST AT SEA and TROOPS HAVING DIFFICULTY MAINTAINING CONNECTION WITH FORTY FIFTH INFANTRY STOP which Randy finds kind of hokey until he remembers that the book was written by people who probably didn’t know what “hokey” meant, who lived in some radically different pre-hokiness era where planes really did get lost at sea and the people in those planes never came back to see their families and in which people who even raised the issue of hokeyness in conversation were likely to end up pitied or shunned or maybe even psychoanalyzed.

  Randy feels like a little shit when he thinks about this stuff. He wonders about Chester. Is the shattered 747 hanging from Chester’s ceiling just a monumental act of bad taste, or is Chester actually making a Statement with that thing? Could it be that nerdy Chester is actually some kind of deep thinker who has transcended the glibness and superficiality of his age? This very subject has been debated by serious people at some length, which is why learned articles about Chester’s house keep showing up in unexpected places. Randy wonders if he’s ever had a serious experience in his life, an experience that would be worth the time it would take to reduce it to a pithy STOP-punctuated message in capital letters and run it through a cryptosystem.

  They must have flown right by the site of the wreck. In a few days Randy will turn right around and come halfway back to Kinakuta to make what meager contribution he can to the job of dragging gold bars out of it. He’s only going to Manila to take care of some business there; some kind of urgent meeting demanded by one of Epiphyte’s Filipino partners. The stuff that Randy came to Manila to do, a year and a half ago, mostly runs itself now, and when it actually requires his attention he finds it fantastically annoying.

  He can see that the modern way of thinking about stuff, as applied to the Cryptonomicon, isn’t going to help him very much in his goal of decrypting the Arethusa intercepts. The original writers of the Cryptonomicon actually had to decrypt and read these goddamn messages in order to save the lives of their countrymen. But the modern annotators have no interest in reading other people’s mail per se; the only reason they pay attention to this subject at all is that they aspire to make new cryptosystems that cannot be broken by the NSA, or now this new IDTRO thing. The Black Chamber. Crypto experts won’t trust a cryptosystem until they have attacked it, and they can’t attack it until they know the basic cryptanalytical techniques, and hence the demand for a document like this modern, annotated version of the Cryptonomicon. But their attacks generally don’t go any further than demonstrating a system’s vulnerabilities in the abstract. All they want is to be able to say in theory this system could be attacked in the following way because from a formal number-theory standpoint it belongs to such-and-such class of problems, and those problems as a group take about so many processor cycles to attack. 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. Of these issues the Cryptonomicon has nothing to say until you tunnel down to its oldest and deepest strata. Some of which, Randy suspects, were written by his grandfather.

  The head flight attendant comes in on the intercom and says something in various languages. Each transition to a new language is accompanied by a sort of frisson of confusion running through the whole passenger compartment: first the English-speaking passengers all ask each other what the English version of the announcement said and just as they are giving it up as a lost cause the Cantonese version winds down and the Chinese-speaking passengers ask each other what it said. The Malay version gets no reaction at all because no one actually speaks the Malay language, except maybe for Randy when he is asking for coffee. Presumably the message has something to do with the fact that the plane is about to land. Manila sprawls out below them in the dark, vast patches of it flickering on and off as different segments of the electrical power grid struggle with their own particular challenges vis-à-vis maintenance and overload. In his mind, Randy is already sitting in front of his TV tucking into a bowl of Cap’n Crunch. Maybe there is a place in NAIA where he can purchase a brick of ice-cold milk, so that he will not even have to stop at a 24 Jam on the way home.

  The Malaysian Air flight attendants all have big smiles for him on the way out; as globe-trotting expat technocrats all know, hospitality-industry people think it is just adorable, or pretend to think so, when you try to use some language—any language—other than English, and they remember you for it. Soon he is inside good old NAIA, which is sort of, but not fully, air-conditioned. There is a whole group of girls in identical windbreakers gathered by his baggage carousel, chattering like an exaltation of larks under a DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS sign. The bags take a long time to arrive�
��Randy wouldn’t have checked baggage at all except that he acquired a lot of books, and a few other souvenirs, on his trip—some salvaged from the ruined house and some inherited from his grandfather’s trunk. And in Kinakuta he bought some new diving gear that he hopes he will put to use very soon. Finally he had to buy a big sort of duffel-bag-on-wheels to carry it all. Randy enjoys watching the girls, apparently some kind of high school or college field-hockey team on the road. For them, even waiting for the baggage carousel to start up is a big adventure, full of thrills and chills; e.g., when the carousel groans into action for a few moments and then shuts down again. But finally it starts up for real, and out comes a whole row of identical gym bags, color-coordinated to match the girls’ uniforms, and in the middle of them is Randy’s big duffel. He heaves it off the carousel and checks the tiny combination padlocks: one on the zipper for the main compartment and one on a smaller pocket at the end of the bag. There is one more tiny pocket on the top of the bag which has no practical function that Randy can think of; he didn’t use it and so he didn’t lock it.

  He deploys the bag’s telescoping handle, lifts it up onto its built-in wheels, and heads for customs. Along the way he gets mixed into the group of field-hockey players, who find this extremely titillating and hilarious, which is slightly embarrassing for him until they start finding their own hilarity hilarious. There are only a few customs lanes open, and there is a sort of traffic director waving people this way and that; he shoos the girls towards the green lane and then, inevitably, ducts Randy into a red one.

  Looking through the lane, Randy can see the area on the other side where people wait to greet arriving passengers. There is a woman in a nice dress there. It’s Amy. Randy comes to a complete stop the better to gape at her. She looks fantastic. He wonders if it’s totally presumptuous of him to think that Amy put on a dress for no other reason than that she knew Randy would enjoy looking at her in it. Whether it’s presumptuous or not, that’s what he does think, and it almost makes him want to faint. He doesn’t want to let his mind run completely out of control here, but maybe there is something better in store for him tonight than digging into a bowl of Cap’n Crunch.