Cryptonomicon, Page 63

  “Gimme that!” he says, and snatches it from her.

  If she were his lover, she would try to play keep-away with him, there would be silliness and, perhaps, more sex at the end of it. But she is a stranger now and she lets him have the wallet.

  She watches him set down the coffee, as if he’s a waiter in a cafe.

  “You have a girlfriend—where? In Mexico?”

  “Manila,” Bobby Shaftoe says, “if she’s even still alive.”

  Julieta nods, completely impassive. She is neither jealous of Glory, nor worried about Glory’s fate at the hands of the Nips. What’s happening in the Philippines can’t be any worse than what she’s seen in Finland. And why should she care, anyway, about the past romantic entanglements of her uncle’s stevedore, young what’s-his-name?

  Shaftoe pulls on boxers, wool pants, a shirt, and a sweater. “I’m going into town,” he says. “Tell Otto I’ll be back to unload the boat.”

  Julieta says nothing.

  As a last, polite gesture, Shaftoe stops at the door, reaches behind a stack of crates, hauls out the Suomi machine pistol* and checks it: clean, loaded, ready for action, just like it was about an hour ago, the last time he checked it. He puts it back in its place, turns around, locks eyes with Julieta for a moment. Then he goes out and pulls the door shut. Behind him, he can hear her naked feet on the cold floor, and the satisfying sound of the door’s bolts being rammed home.

  He steps into a pair of tall rubber boots and then begins to trudge south along the beach. The boots are Otto’s and are a couple of sizes too big for his feet. They make him feel like a little boy, splashing through puddles in Wisconsin. This is what a boy of his age ought to be doing: working, hard and honest, at a simple job. Kissing girls. Walking into town to buy some smokes and maybe have a beer. The idea of flying around on heavily armed warplanes and using modern weapons systems to kill hundreds of foreign homicidal maniacs now strikes him as dated and inappropriate.

  He slows down every few hundred yards to look at a steel drum, or other war debris, cast up by the waves, half-buried in sand, stenciled cryptically in Cyrillic or Finnish or German. They remind him of the Nipponese drums on that Guadalcanal beach.

  Moon lifts sea, but not

  the ones who sleep on the beach

  Each wave a shovel

  A lot of stuff gets wasted in a war—not just stuff that comes in crates and drums. It frequently happens, for example, that men are called upon to die willingly that others may live. Shaftoe learned on Guadalcanal that you can never tell when circumstances will make you into that guy. You can go into battle with the clearest, simplest, smartest plan ever devised, worked out by Annapolis-trained, battle-hardened Marine officers, and based upon tons of intelligence. But ten seconds after the first trigger has been pulled, shit is happening all over the place, people are running around like maniacs. The battle plan that was genius a minute ago suddenly looks as sweetly naive as the inscriptions in your high school yearbook. Guys are dying. Some of them are dying because a shell happens to fall on them, but surprisingly often, they are dying because they are ordered to.

  It was like that with U-691. That whole thing with the Trinidadian steamer was probably a brilliant plan (Waterhouse’s, he suspects) at some point. But then it all went wrong, and some Allied commander gave the order that Shaftoe and Root, along with the crew of U-691, were to die.

  He should have died on the beach on Guadalcanal, along with his buddies, and he didn’t. Everything between then and U-691 was just sort of an extra bonus life. He got a chance to go home and see his family, sort of like Jesus after the Resurrection.

  Now Bobby Shaftoe is dead for sure. This is why he walks so slowly down the beach, and takes such a brotherly interest in these items, because Bobby Shaftoe is, too, a corpse washed up on the beach in Sweden.

  He is thinking about this when he sees the Heavenly Apparition.

  The sky here is like a freshly galvanized bucket that has been inverted over the world to block out inconvenient sunlight; if someone lights up a cigarette half a mile away, it blazes like a nova. By those standards, the Heavenly Apparition looks like a whole galaxy falling out of orbit to graze the surface of the world. You could almost mistake it for an airplane, except that it does not make the requisite chesty, droning thrum. This thing emits a screaming whine—and a long trail of fire. Besides, it goes too fast for an airplane. It comes streaking in from the Gulf of Bothnia and crosses the shoreline a couple of miles north of Otto’s cabin, gradually losing altitude and slowing down. But as it slows down, the flames burgeon, and claw their way forward up the thing’s black body, which resembles the crumpled, curling wick at the root of a candle flame.

  It disappears behind trees. Around here, everything disappears behind trees sooner or later. A ball of fire erupts from those trees, and Bobby Shaftoe says, “One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four, one thousand five, one thousand six, one thousand seven” and then stops, hearing the explosion. Then he turns around and walks into Norrsbruck, going faster now.

  LAVENDER ROSE

  * * *

  RANDY WANTS TO GO DOWN AND LOOK AT THE U-boat in person. Doug says evenly that Randy is welcome to do so, but he needs to draw up a valid dive plan first, and reminds him that the depth of the wreck is one hundred and fifty-four meters. Randy nods as if he had, of course, expected to draw up a dive plan.

  He wants everything to be like driving cars, where you just hop in and go. He knows a couple of guys who fly airplanes, and he can still remember how he felt when he learned that you can’t just get in a plane (even a small one) and take off—you have to have a flight plan, and it takes a whole briefcase full of books and tables and specialized calculators, and access to weather forecasts above and beyond the normal consumer-grade weather forecasts, to come up with even a bad, wrong flight plan that will surely kill you. Once Randy had gotten used to this idea, he grudgingly admitted it made sense.

  Now Doug Shaftoe’s telling him he needs a plan just to strap some tanks on his back and swim a hundred and fifty-four meters (straight down, admittedly) and back. So Randy yanks a couple of diving books off the bungeed shelves of Glory IV and tries to come up with even a vague idea of what Doug’s talking about. Randy has never gone scuba diving in his life, but he’s seen them doing it on Jacques Cousteau and it seems straightforward enough.

  The first three books he consults contain more than enough detail to perfectly reproduce the crestfallenness that Randy experienced when he learned about flight plans. Before he’d opened the books Randy had gotten out his mechanical pencil and his graph paper in preparation for making marks on the page; half an hour later he’s still trying to get a handle on the contents of the tables, and he hasn’t made any marks at all. He notes that the depths in these tables only go down as far as a hundred and thirty, and at that level they only talk in terms of staying down there five or ten minutes. And yet he knows that Amy, and the Shaftoe’s colorful and ever-enlarging cast of polyethnic scuba divers, are spending much longer at this depth, and are in fact beginning to come up to the surface with artifacts from the wreck. There is, for example, an aluminum briefcase wherein Doug hopes to find clues as to who was on this U-boat and why it was on the wrong side of the planet.

  Randy begins to fear that the entire wreck is going to be stripped bare before he even makes any marks on his piece of graph paper. The divers show up, one or two each day, on speedboats or outrigger canoes from Palawan. Blond surf boys, taciturn galoots, cigarette-smoking Frenchmen, Nintendo-playing Asians, beer-can-crumpling ex-Navy guys, blue-collar hillbillies. They all have diving plans. Why doesn’t Randy have a diving plan?

  He starts sketching one out based on the depth of one hundred and thirty, which seems reasonably close to one hundred and fifty-four. After working on it for about an hour (long enough to imagine all sorts of specious details) he happens to notice that the table he’s been using is in feet, not meters, which means that all of these
divers have been going down to a depth that is way more than three times as deep as the maximum that is even talked about on these tables.

  Randy closes up all of the books and looks at them peevishly for a while. They are all nice new books with color photographs on the covers. He picked them off the shelf because (getting introspective here) he is a computer guy, and in the computer world any book printed more than two months ago is a campy nostalgia item. Investigating a little more, he finds that all three of these shiny new books have been personally autographed by the authors, with long personal inscriptions: two addressed to Doug, and one to Amy. The one to Amy has obviously been written by a man who is desperately in love with her. Reading it is like moisturizing with Tabasco.

  He concludes that these are all consumer-grade diving books written for rum-drenched tourists, and furthermore that the publishers probably had teams of lawyers go over them one word at a time to make sure there would not be liability trouble. That the contents of these books, therefore, probably represent about one percent of everything that the authors actually know about diving, but that the lawyers have made sure that the authors don’t even mention that.

  Okay, so divers have mastered a large body of occult knowledge. That explains their general resemblance to hackers, albeit physically fit hackers.

  Doug Shaftoe is not going down to the wreck himself. As a matter of fact he looked surprised, bordering on contemptuous, when Randy asked him whether he would go down. Instead, he’s going over the stuff that is brought up from the wreck by the younger divers. They began by doing a photographic survey, using digital cameras, and Doug’s been printing out blowups of the inside of the U-boat on his laser printer and pasting them up around the walls of his personal wardroom on Glory IV.

  Randy does a sorting procedure on the diving books now: he ignores anything that has color photographs, or that appears to have been published within the last twenty years, or that has any quotes on the back cover containing the words stunning, superb, user-friendly, or, worst of all, easy-to-understand. He looks for old, thick books with worn-out bindings and block-lettered titles like DIVE MANUAL. Anything with angry marginal notes written by Doug Shaftoe gets extra points.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Pontifex

  Randy,

  For now, let’s use “Pontifex” as the working title of this cryptosystem. It is a post-war system. What I mean by that is that, after seeing what Turing and company did to Enigma, I came to the (now obvious) conclusion that any modern system had better be resistant to machine cryptanalysis. Pontifex uses a 54-element permutation as its key—one key per message, mind you!—and it uses that permutation (which we will denote as T) to generate a keystream which is added, modulo 26, to the plaintext (P), as in a one-time pad. The process of generating each character in the keystream alters T in a reversible but more or less “random” fashion.

  At this point, a diver comes up with a piece of actual gold, but it’s not a bar: it’s a sheet of hammered gold, maybe eight inches on a side and about a quarter of a millimeter thick, with a pattern of tiny neat holes punched through it, like a computer card. Randy spends a couple of days obsessing over this artifact. He learns that it came out of a crate stored in the hold of the U-boat, and that there are thousands more of them.

  Now all of a sudden he’s reading stuff by guys whose names are preceded by naval ranks and succeeded by M.D.s and Ph.D.s and they are going on for dozens of pages about the physics of nitrogen bubble formation in the knee, for example. There are photographs of cats strapped down in benchtop pressure chambers. Randy learns that the reason Doug Shaftoe doesn’t dive to one hundred and fifty-four meters is that certain age-related changes in the joints tend to increase the likelihood of bubble formation during the decompression process. He comes to terms with the fact that the pressure at the depth of the wreck is going to be fifteen or sixteen atmospheres, meaning that as he ascends to the surface, any nitrogen bubbles that happen to be rattling around in his body are going to get fifteen or sixteen times as large as they were to begin with and that this is true whether those bubbles happen to be in his brain, his knee, the little blood vessels of the eyeball, or trapped underneath his fillings. He develops a sophisticated layman’s understanding of dive medicine, which amounts to little because everyone’s body is different—hence the need for each diver to have a completely different dive plan. Randy will need to figure out his body fat percentage before he can even begin marking up his sheet of graph paper.

  It is also path-dependent. These divers’ bodies get partly saturated with nitrogen every time they go down, and not all of it goes out of their bodies when they come back up—all of them, sitting around Glory IV playing cards, drinking beer, talking to their girlfriends on their GSM phones, are all outgassing all the time—nitrogen is seeping out of their bodies into the atmosphere, and each one of them knows more or less how much nitrogen’s stuffed into his body at any given moment and understands, in a deep and nearly intuitive way, just exactly how that information propagates through any dive plan that he might be cooking up inside the powerful dive-planning supercomputer that each of these guys apparently carries around in his nitrogen-saturated brain.

  One of the divers comes up with a plank from the crate that contained the stacks of gold sheets. It is in very bad shape, and it’s still fizzing as gas comes out of it. Fizzing in a way that Randy has no trouble imagining his bones would do if he made any errors in working out his dive plan. There is some stenciled lettering just barely visible on the wood: NIZ-ARCH.

  Glory IV has compressors for pumping air up to insanely high pressures to fill the scuba tanks. Randy develops an awareness that the pressure has to be insanely high or it won’t even emerge from the tanks while these guys are down at depth. The divers are all being suffused with this pressurized gas; he half expects that one of these divers is going to bump into something and explode into a pink mushroom cloud.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  Subject: Pontifex

  R—

  You forwarded me a message about a cryptosystem called Pontifex. Was this invented by a friend of yours? In its general outlines (viz. an n-element per mutation that is used to generate a keystream, and that slowly evolves) it is similar to a commercial system called RC4, which enjoys a complicated reputation among Secret Admirers—it seems secure, and has not been broken, but it makes us nervous because it is basically a single-rotor system, albeit a rotor that evolves. Pontifex evolves in a much more complicated & asymmetrical way than RC4 and so might be more secure.

  Some things about Pontifex are slightly peculiar.

  (1) He talks about generating “characters” in the keystream and then adding them, modulo 26, to the plaintext. This is how people talked 50 years ago when ciphers were worked out using pencil and paper. Today we talk in terms of generating bytes and adding them modulo 256. Is your friend pretty old?

  (2) He speaks of T as a 54-element permutation. There is nothing wrong with that—but Pontifex would work just as well with 64 or 73 or 699 elements, so it makes more sense to describe it as an n-element permutation where n could be 54 or any other integer. I can’t figure out why he settled on 54. Possibly because it is twice the number of letters in the alphabet—but this makes no particular sense.

  Conclusion: the author of Pontifex is cryptologically sophisticated but shows possible signs of being an elderly crank. I need more details in order to deliver a verdict.

  —Cantrell

  “Randy?” says Doug Shaftoe, and beckons him into his wardroom.

  The inside of the wardroom door is decorated with a big color photograph of a massive stone staircase in a dusty church. They stand in front of it. “Are there a lot of Waterhouses?” Doug asks. “Is it a common name?”

  “Uh, well, it’s not a rare name.”

  “Is there anything you’d like to share with me about your family histor
y?”

  Randy knows that as a possible suitor to Amy, he will be undergoing thorough scrutiny at all times. The Shaftoes are doing due diligence on him. “What kind of thing are you looking for? Something terrible? I don’t think there’s anything worth hiding from you.”

  Doug stares at him distractedly for a while, then turns to face the now open aluminum briefcase from the U-boat. Randy supposes that merely opening it required coming up with a detailed plan. Doug has spread out miscellaneous contents on a tabletop to be photographed and cataloged. Ex-Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe has, at the peak of his career, become a sort of librarian.

  Randy sees a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, a fountain pen, a few rusty paper clips. But it looks as though a lot of sodden paper was taken out of that briefcase too, and Doug Shaftoe has been carefully drying it out and trying to read it. “Most wartime paper was crap,” he says. “It probably dissolved into mush within days of the sinking. The paper in this briefcase was at least protected from marine critters, but most of it’s gone. However, the owner of this briefcase was apparently some sort of aristocrat. Check out the glasses, the pen.”

  Randy checks them out. The divers have found teeth and fillings in the wreck, but nothing that qualifies as a body. The places where people died are marked by these trails of hard, inert remains, such as eyeglasses. Like the debris footprint of an exploded airliner.

  “So what I’m getting at is that he had a few scraps of good paper in his briefcase,” Doug continues. “Personal stationery. So we suspect his name was Rudolf von Hacklheber. Does that name ring any bells with you?”