Cryptonomicon

"Sure. Thanks." Randy pulls out a folding multipurpose tool and cuts the end from the cigar, a pretty impressive-looking Cuban number. "Why do you say it's a good time to smoke?"

"To fix it in your memory. To mark it." Doug tears his gaze from the horizon and looks at Randy searchingly, almost beseeching him to understand. "This is one of the most important moments in your life. Nothing will ever be the same. We might get rich. We might get killed. We might just have an adventure, or learn something. But we have been changed. We are standing close to the Heracitean fire, feeling its heat on our faces." He produces a flaring safety match from his cupped palms like a magician, and holds it up before Randy's eyes, and Randy puffs the cigar alive, staring into the flame.

"Well, here's to it," Randy says.

"And here's to whoever got out," replies Doug.

Chapter 50 SANTA MONICA

The United States Military (Waterhouse has decided) is first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization. For the last couple of weeks he has been owned by the second group. They put him on a luxury liner too swift to be caught by U-boats--though this is a moot point since, as Waterhouse and a few other people know, Dönitz has declared defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic, and pulled his U-boats off the map until he can build the new generation, which will run on rocket fuel and need never come to the surface. In this way Waterhouse got to New York. From Penn Station he took trains to the Midwest, where he spent a week with his family and reassured them for the ten thousandth time that, because of what he knew, he could never be sent into actual combat.

Then it was trains again to Los Angeles, and now he waits for what sounds like it will be a killing series of airplane flights halfway round the world to Brisbane. He is one of about a million young men and women in uniform and on leave, wandering around Los Angeles looking for some entertainment.

Now, they say that this city is the entertainment capital and so entertainment shouldn't be hard to find. Indeed you can hardly walk down a city block without bumping into half a dozen prostitutes and passing an equal number of night spots, movie theaters, and pool halls. Waterhouse samples all of these during his four-day layover, and is distressed to find that he is no longer entertained by any of them. Not even the whores!

Maybe this is why he is walking along the bluff north of the Santa Monica Pier, looking for a way down to the beach, which is completely empty--the only thing in Los Angeles that isn't generating commissions and residuals for someone. The beach lures but does not pander. The plants up here, standing watch over the Pacific, are like something from another planet. No, they do not even look like real plants from any conceivable planet. They are too geometric and perfect. They are schematic diagrams for plants sketched out by some impossibly modern designer with a strong eye for geometry but who has never been out in a woods and seen a real plant. They don't even grow out of any recognizable organic matrix, they are embedded in the sterile ochre dust that passes for soil in this part of the country. Waterhouse knows that this is just the beginning, that it will only get weirder from here on out. He heard enough from Bobby Shaftoe to know that the other side of the Pacific is going to be indescribably strange.

The sun is preparing to go down and the pier, down the beach to his left, is alight, a gaudy galaxy; the zoot suits of the carnival barkers stand out from a mile away, like emergency flares. But Waterhouse is in no hurry to reach it. He can see ignorant armies of soldiers, sailors, marines milling around, distinguishable by the hues of their uniforms.

The last time he was in California, before Pearl Harbor, he was no different from all of those guys on the pier--just a little smarter, with a knack for numbers and music. But now he understands the war in a way that they never will. He is still wearing the same uniform, but only as a disguise. He believes now that the war, as those guys understand it, is every bit as fictional as the war movies being turned out across town in Hollywood.

They say that Patton and MacArthur are daring generals; the world watches in anticipation of their next intrepid sortie behind enemy lines. Waterhouse knows that Patton and MacArthur, more than anything else, are intelligent consumers of Ultra/Magic. They use it to figure out where the enemy has concentrated his forces, then loop around them and strike where he is weakest. That's all.

They say that Montgomery is a steady hand, cagey and insightful. Waterhouse has no use for Monty; Monty's an idiot; Monty doesn't read his Ultra; he ignores it, in fact, to the detriment of his men and of the war effort.