Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

“Ordo's status as purveyor of stuff that the government hates and fears is just coincidental,” Randy guesses.

“That's right.”

“Well then, I'm sure there's nothing to it other than our troubles with the Dentist,” Randy says.

“What troubles are those, Randy?”

“Happened during the middle of the night, your time. I'm sure you will have some interesting faxes awaiting you this morning.”

“Well, maybe I should look at those faxes, then,” Doug Shaftoe says.

“Maybe I'll give you a buzz when I reach Kinakuta,” Randy says.

“You have a good flight, Randall.”

“Have a nice day, Douglas.”

Randy puts the phone back in its armrest cradle and prepares to sink into a well-deserved plane-coma. But five minutes later the phone rings. It is so disorienting to have one's phone ring on an airplane that he doesn't know what to make of it for a while. When he finally realizes what's going on, he has to consult the instruction card to figure out how to answer it.

When he finally has the thing turned on and at his ear, a voice says, “You call that subtle? You think that you and Doug Shaftoe are the only two people in the world who know that Sultan-Class passengers can receive incoming phone calls?” Randy is certain he's never heard this voice before. It is the voice of an old man. Not a voice worn out or cracking with age, but a voice that's been slowly worn smooth, like the steps of a cathedral.

“Um, who's this?”

“Am I right in thinking that you want Mr. Shaftoe to go to a pay telephone somewhere and then call you back?”

“Who is this, please?”

“You think that's more secure than his GSM phone? It's not really.” The speaker pauses frequently before, during, and after sentences, as if he's been spending a lot of time alone, and is having trouble hitting his conversational stride.

“Okay,” Randy says, “you know who I am and whom I was calling. So obviously you are surveilling me. You're not working for the Dentist, I take it. That leaves—what? The United States Government? The NSA, right?”

The man laughs. “As a rule the Fort Meade boys don't bother to check in with the people whose lines they are tapping.” The caller has an un-American crispness in his voice, vaguely Northern European. “In your case the NSA might make an exception, it's true—when I was there, they were all great admirers of your grandfather's work. In fact, they liked it so much they stole it.”

“No higher flattery, I guess.”

“You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you're not.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Oh, because then you'd be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices—who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much worse than being a moron.”

“Did Grandpa work for you at the NSA?”

“He wasn't interested. Said he had a higher calling. So while he made better and better computers to solve the Harvard-Waterhouse Prime Factor Challenge, my friends at the NSA watched him, and learned.”

“And you did too.”

“I? Oh, no, I have only modest skills with a soldering iron. I was there to watch the NSA watching your grandfather.”

“On behalf of—whom? Don't tell me—eruditorum.org?”

“Well done, Randy.”

“What should I call you—Root? Pontifex?”

“Pontifex is a nice word.”

“It's true,” Randy says. “I checked it out, looking for clues in the etymology—it's an old Latin word meaning 'priest.' ”

“Catholics call the Pope 'Pontifex Maximus,' or pontiff for short,” says Pontifex agreeably, “but the word was also used by pagans to denote their priests, and Jews their rabbis—it is ever so ecumenical.”

“But the literal meaning of the word is 'bridge builder,' and so it's a good name for a cryptosystem,” Randy says.

“Or, I hope, for me,” Pontifex says drily. “I am glad you feel that way, Randy. Many people would think of a cryptosystem as a wall, rather than a bridge.”

“Well, gosh. It's nice to telephonically meet you, Pontifex.”

“The pleasure is mutual.”

“You've been so quiet on the e-mail front recently.”

“Didn't want to give you the creeps. I was afraid if I bothered you any more, you'd think I was proselytizing.”

“Not at all. By the way—people in the know think your cryptosystem is weird, but good.”

“It's not weird at all, once you understand it,” Pontifex says politely.

“Well, uh, what occasions this phone call? Obviously your friends are still surveilling me on behalf of—whom, exactly?”

“I don't even know,” Pontifex says. “But I do know that you're trying to crack Arethusa.”

Randy cannot even remember ever uttering the word “Arethusa.” It was printed on the wrappers on the bricks of ETC cards that he ran through Chester's card reader. Now Randy pictures a box inside Grandpa's old trunk labeled Harvard-Waterhouse Prime Factor Challenge and dated in the early 1950s. So that at least gives him a date to peg on Pontifex. “You were at NSA during the late forties and early fifties,” Randy says. “You must have worked on Harvest.” Harvest was a legendary code-breaking supercomputer, three decades ahead of its time, built by ETC engineers working under an NSA contract.

“I told you,” Pontifex says, “your grandfather's work came in handy.”

“Chester's got this retired ETC engineer working on his card machinery,” Randy says. “He helped me read the Arethusa cards. Saw the wrappers. He's a friend of yours. He called you.”

Pontifex chuckles. “Among our little band there is hardly a word with more memories attached to it than Arethusa. He nearly hit the floor when he saw it. Called me from the cellphone on his boat, Randy.”

“Why? Why was Arethusa such a big deal?”

“Because we spent ten years of our lives trying to break the damned code! And we failed!”

“It must have been really frustrating,” Randy says, “you still sound angry.”

“I'm angry at Comstock.”

“Not the—”

“Not Attorney General Paul Comstock. His father. Earl Comstock.”

“What!? The guy that Doug Shaftoe threw off the ski lift? The Vietnam guy?”

“No, no! I mean, yes. Earl Comstock was largely responsible for our Vietnam policy. And Doug Shaftoe did get his fifteen minutes of fame by throwing him off a ski lift in, I believe, 1979. But all of that Vietnam nonsense was just a coda to his real career.”

“Which was?”

“Earl Comstock, to whom your grandfather reported in Brisbane during World War II, was one of the founders of the NSA. And he was my boss from 1949 through about 1960. He was obsessed with Arethusa.”

“Why?”

“He was convinced it was a Communist cipher. That if we could break it, we could then exploit that break to get into some later Soviet codes that were giving us difficulty. Which was ridiculous. But he believed it—or claimed to—and so we battered our heads against Arethusa for years. Strong men had nervous breakdowns. Brilliant men concluded that they were stupid. In the end it turned out to be a joke.”

“A joke? What do you mean by that?”

“We ran those intercepts through Harvest backwards and forwards. The lights dimmed in Washington and Baltimore, we used to say, when we were doing Arethusa work. I still have the opening groups memorized: AADAA FGTAA and so on. Those double As! People wrote dissertations about their significance. We concluded in the end that they were just flukes. We invented entire new systems of cryptanalysis to attack it—wrote new volumes of the Cryptonomicon. 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.”