Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

“You were right,” Comstock says, rattling the paper. “But did you know that he was very likely a Communist?”

“I had no knowledge of his political leanings.”

“Well, he is a homo, for one thing, and Hitler hated homos, so that might have pushed him into the arms of the Reds. Also, he was working under a couple of Russians at Hauptgruppe B. Supposedly they were Czarists, and pro-Hitler, but you never know. Well, anyway, in the middle of the war, sometime in late '43, he apparently fled to Sweden. Isn't that funny?”

“Why's it funny?”

“If you have the wherewithal to escape from Germany, why not go to England, and fight for the good guys? No, he went to the east coast of Sweden—directly across the water,” Comstock says portentously, “from Finland. Which borders on the Soviet Union.” He slaps the page down on his desk. “Seems pretty clear-cut to me.”

“So…”

“And now, we have these goddamn Arethusa messages bouncing around. Some of them emanating from right here in Manila! Some coming from a mysterious submarine. Not a Nip submarine, evidently. It seems very much like a secret espionage ring of some description. Wouldn't you say so?”

Waterhouse shrugs. “Interpretation isn't my department.”

“It is mine,” Comstock says, “and I say it's espionage. Probably directed from the Kremlin. Why? Because they are using a cryptosystem that, according to you, is based on Azure/Pufferfish, which was invented by the Communist homo Rudolf von Hacklheber. I hypothesize that von Hacklheber only stayed in Sweden long enough to get some shuteye and maybe cornhole some nice blond boy and then scooted right over to Finland and from there to the waiting arms of Lavrenti Beria.”

“Well, gosh!” Waterhouse says, “what do you think we should do?”

“I have taken this Arethusa thing off the back burner. We have become lazy and complacent. More than once, our huffduff people observed Arethusa messages emanating from this general area.” Comstock raises his index finger to a map of Luzon. Then he catches himself, realizing that this would be more dignified if he used a pointer. He bends down and grabs a long pointer. Then he realizes he is too close, and has to back up a couple of steps in order to get the business end of the pointer on the part of the map that his index finger was touching a moment earlier. Finally situated, he vigorously circles a coastal region south of Manila, along the strait that separates Luzon from Mindoro. “South of all these volcanoes, along the coast here. This is where that submarine has been skulking around. We haven't gotten a good fix on the bastards yet, because all of our huffduff stations have been way up north here.” The pointer swoops up for a lightning raid on the Cordillera Central, where Yamashita has gone to ground. “But not anymore.” Down swoops the pointer, vengefully. “I have ordered several huffduff units to set up in this area, and at the northern end of Mindoro. Next time that submarine transmits an Arethusa message, we'll have Catalinas overhead within fifteen minutes.”

“Well,” Waterhouse volunteers, “maybe I should get cracking on breaking that darn code, then.”

“If you could accomplish that, Waterhouse, it would be brilliant. It would mean victory in this, our first cryptological skirmish with the Communists. It would be a splendid kick-off for your relationship with Electrical Till and the NSA. We could set your new bride up with a nice house in the horse country, a gas stove, and a Hoover that would make her forget all about the Palouse Hills.”

“Sounds pretty darn inviting,” Waterhouse says. “I just can't hold myself back!” And with that, he's out the door.

In a stone room in a half-ruined church, Enoch Root looks out of a busted window and grimaces. “I am not a mathematician,” he says. “I only did the calculations that Dengo asked me to do. You will have to ask him to encrypt the message.”

“Find another place for your transmitter,” Waterhouse says, “and be ready to use it on short notice.”

Goto Dengo is right where he said he would be, sitting on the bleachers above third base. The ballfield has been repaired, but no one is playing now. He and Waterhouse have the place to themselves, except for a couple of poor Filipino peasants, driven down to Manila by the war up north, scavenging for dropped popcorn.

“What you ask is very dangerous,” he says.

“It will be totally secret,” Waterhouse says.

“Think into the future,” says Goto Dengo. “One day, these digital computers you speak of will break the Arethusa code. Is this not so?”

“It is so. Not for many years.”

“Say ten years. Say twenty years. The code is broken. Then they will go back and find all of the old Arethusa messages—including the message that you want to send to your friends—and read them. So?”

“Yes. It is true.”

“And then they will see this message that says, 'Warning, warning, Comstock has laid a trap, the huffduff stations are waiting for you, do not transmit.' Then they will know that there was a spy in Comstock's office. Certainly they will know it was you.”

“You're right. You're right. I didn't think of that,” Waterhouse says. Then he realizes something else. “They'll know about you too.”

Goto Dengo blanches. “Please. I am so tired.”

“One of the Arethusa messages spoke of a person named GD.” Goto Dengo puts his head in his hands and is perfectly motionless for a long time. He does not have to say it. He and Waterhouse are imagining the same thing: twenty years in the future, Nipponese police burst into the office of Goto Dengo, prosperous businessman, and arrest him for being a Communist spy.

“Only if they decrypt those old messages,” Waterhouse says.

“But they will. You said that they will decrypt them.”

“Only if they have them,” Waterhouse says.

“But they do have them.”

“They are in my office.”

Goto Dengo is shocked, horrified. “You are not thinking to steal the messages?”

“That's exactly what I'm thinking.”

“But this will be noticed.”

“No! I will replace them with others.”

The voice of Alan Mathison Turing shouts above the buzz of the Project X synchronization tone. The long-playing record, filled with noise, spins on its turntable. “You want the latest in random numbers?”

“Yeah. Some mathematical function that will give me nearly perfect randomness. I know you've been working on this.”

“Oh yes,” Turing says. “I can provide a much higher degree of randomness than what is on these idiotic phonograph records that you and I are staring at.”

“How do you do it?”

“I have in mind a zeta function that is simple to understand, extremely tedious to calculate. I hope you have laid in a good stock of valves.”

“Don't worry about that, Alan.”

“Do you have a pencil?”

“Of course.”

“Very well then,” Turing says, and begins to call out the symbols of the function.

The Basement is suffocatingly hot because Waterhouse shares it with a coworker who generates thousands of watts of body heat. The coworker both eats and shits ETC cards. What it does in between is Waterhouse's business.

He spends about twenty-four hours sitting there, stripped to the waist, his undershirt wrapped around his head like a turban so he won't drop sweat into the works and cause short circuits, flicking switches on the digital computer's front panel, swapping patch cords on the back, replacing burned-out tubes and bulbs, probing malfunctioning circuits with an oscilloscope. In order to make the computer execute Alan's random number function, he even has to design a new circuit board on the fly, and solder it together. The entire time, he knows, Goto Dengo and Enoch Root are at work somewhere in Manila with scratch paper and pencils, encrypting the final Arethusa message.