Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

“Girl talk.”

“I didn't know you were even rigged for girl talk.”

“We can all do it.”

“Did you learn anything else about the wedding? Like—”

“The china pattern?”

“Yeah.”

“It was in fact Lavender Rose,” Amy says.

“So it fits. I mean, it fits chronologically. The submarine went down in May of 1945 off of Palawan—four months before the wedding. Knowing my grandmother, wedding preparations would have been well advanced by that point—they definitely would have settled on a china pattern.”

“And you think you have a photo of your grandpa in Manila around that time?”

“It's definitely Manila. And Manila wasn't liberated until March of '45.”

“So what do we have, then? Your grandpa must've had some kind of connection with someone on that U-boat, between March and May.”

“A pair of eyeglasses was found on the U-boat.” Randy pulls a photo out of his shirt pocket and hands it across to Amy. “I'd be interested to know if they match the specs on that guy. The tall blond.”

“I can check it out when I go back. Is the geek on the left your grandpa?”

“Yeah.”

“Who's the geek in the middle?”

“I think it's Turing.”

“Turing, as in TURING Magazine?”

“They named the magazine after him because he did a lot of early work with computers,” Randy says.

“Like your grandpa did.”

“Yeah.”

“How about this guy we're going to see in Seattle? He's a computer guy too? Ooh, you're getting this look on your face like 'Amy just said something so stupid it caused me physical pain.' Is this a common facial expression among the men of your family? Do you think it is the expression that your grandfather wore when your grandmother came home and announced that she had backed the Lincoln Continental into a fire hydrant?”

“I am sorry if I make you feel bad sometimes,” Randy says. “The family is full of scientists. Mathematicians. The least intelligent of us become engineers. Which is sort of what I am.”

“Excuse me, did you just say you were one of the least intelligent?”

“Least focused, maybe.”

“My point is that precision, and getting things right, in the mathematical sense, is the one thing we have going for us. Everyone has to have a way of getting ahead, right? Otherwise you end up working at McDonald's your whole life, or worse. Some are born rich. Some are born into a big family like yours. We make our way in the world by knowing that two plus two equals four, and sticking to our guns in a way that is kind of nerdy and that maybe hurts people's feelings sometimes. I'm sorry.”

“Hurts whose feelings? People who think that two plus two equals five?”

“People who put a higher priority on social graces than on having every statement uttered in a conversation be literally true.”

“Like, for example… female people?”

Randy grinds his teeth for about a mile, and then says, “If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this incredibly narrow laser-beam focus on one tiny little subject and think about nothing else.”

“Whereas women can't?”

“I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I'm characterizing here, as the female approach, is essentially saner and healthier.”

“See, you are being a little paranoid here and focusing on the negative too much. It's not about how women are deficient. It's more about how men are deficient. Our social deficiencies, lack of perspective, or whatever you want to call it, is what enables us to study one species of dragonfly for twenty years, or sit in front of a computer for a hundred hours a week writing code. This is not the behavior of a well-balanced and healthy person, but it can obviously lead to great advances in synthetic fibers. Or whatever.”

“But you said that you yourself were not very focused.”

“Compared to other men in my family, that's true. 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.”

Randy gets embarrassed.

“It's fun to watch,” Amy says encouragingly. “It speaks well of you.”

“What I'm saying is that this does set me apart. One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he's socially inept—because everybody's been there—but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.”

“Which is still kind of pathetic.”

“It was pathetic when they were in high school,” Randy says. “Now it's something else. Something very different from pathetic.”

“What, then?”

“I don't know. There is no word for it. You'll see.”

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 landscape turns wet, and so green it's almost blue, and bolts straight up out of the soil in the space of about a mile. The fast lanes of Interstate 90 are strewn with brown snow turds melted loose from homebound skiers' Broncos. Semis plummet past them in writhing conical shrouds of water and steam. Randy's startled to see new office buildings halfway up the foothills, sporting high-tech logos. Then he wonders why he's startled. Amy has never been here, and she takes her feet down from the airbag deployment panel and sits up straight to look, wishing out loud that Robin and Marcus Aurelius had come along, instead of turning back towards Tennessee. Randy remembers to glide over into the right lanes and slow down as they shed the last thousand feet of altitude into Issaquah, and sure enough the highway patrol is out there ticketing speeders. Amy's duly impressed by this display of acumen. They are still miles outside of the city core, in the half-forested suburbs of the East Side, where street and avenue numbers are up in the triple digits, when Randy pulls onto an exit ramp and drives them down a long commercial strip that turns out to be just the sphere of influence of a big mall. Several satellite malls have burst from the asphalt all around it, wiping out old landmarks and screwing up Randy's navigation. Everything is crowded because people are out returning their Christmas gifts. After a little bit of driving around and cursing, Randy finds the core mall, which looks a little shabby compared to its satellites. He parks in the far corner of the lot, explaining that it is more logical to do this and then walk for fifteen seconds than it is to spend fifteen minutes looking for a closer space.

Randy and Amy stand behind the Acura's open trunk for a minute peeling off layers of suddenly gratuitous Eastern Washington insulation. Amy frets about her cousins and wishes that she and Randy had donated all of their cold-weather gear to them; when last seen they were circling the Impala like a pair of carrier-based fighter aircraft orbiting their mother ship in preparation for landing, checking tire pressures and fluid levels with an intensity, an alertness, that made it seem as if they were about to do something much more exciting than settle their asses into bucket seats and drive east for a couple of days. They have a gallant style about them that must knock the girls dead back home. Amy hugged them both passionately, as if she'd never see them again, and they accepted her hugs with dignity and forbearance, and then they were gone; resisting the urge to lay a patch until they were a couple of blocks distant.