Cryptonomicon

They say that Yamamoto was killed by a lucky accident when some roving P-38s just happened across an anonymous flight of Nipponese planes and shot them down. Waterhouse knows that Yamamoto's death warrant was hammered out by an Electrical Till Corporation line printer in a Hawaiian cryptanalysis factory, and that the admiral was the victim of a straightforward political assassination.

Even his concept of geography has changed. When he was home, he sat down with his grandparents and they looked at the globe, spinning it around until all they saw was blue, tracing his route across the Pacific, from one lonely volcano to the next godforsaken atoll. Waterhouse knows that those little islands, before the war, had only one economic function: information processing. The dots and dashes traveling along the undersea cable are swallowed up by the earth currents after a few thousand miles, like ripples in heavy surf. The European powers colonized those islands at about the same time as the long cables were being laid, and constructed power stations where the dots and dashes coming down the line were picked up, amplified, and sent on to the next chain of islands.

Some of those cables must plunge into the deep not far from this beach. Waterhouse is about to follow the dots and dashes over the western horizon, where the world ends.

He finds a ramp that leads down to the beach and lets gravity draw him towards sea level, gazing to the south and west. The water is pacific and colorless beneath a hazy sky, the horizon line is barely discernable.

The fine dry sand plumps under his feet in fat circular waves that crest around his ankles, so he has to stop and unlace his hard leather shoes. Sand has become trapped in the matrix of his black socks and he pulls them off too and stuffs them in his pockets. He walks towards the water carrying one shoe in each hand. He sees others who have tied their shoes together through belt loops, leaving their hands free. But the asymmetry of this offends him, so he carries his shoes as if preparing to invert himself and wade on his hands with his head dangling into the water.

The low sun shines flatly across the sand, grazing the chaos and creating a knife-sharp terminator at the crest of each dunelet. The curves flirt and osculate with one another in some pattern that is, Waterhouse guesses, deeply fascinating and significant but too challenging for his tired mind to attack. Some areas have been stomped level by seagulls.

The sand at the surf line has been washed flat. A small child's footprints wander across it, splaying like gardenia blossoms on thin shafts. The sand looks like a geometric plane until a sheet of ocean grazes it. Then small imperfections are betrayed by swirls in the water. Those swirls in turn carve the sand. The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and some times carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks. Plodding through the surf, Waterhouse strikes deep craters in the wet sand that are read by the ocean. Eventually the ocean erases them, but in the process its state has been changed, the pattern of its swirls has been altered. Waterhouse imagines that the disturbance might somehow propagate across the Pacific and into some super-secret Nipponese surveillance device made of bamboo tubes and chrysanthemum leaves; Nip listeners would know that Waterhouse had walked that way. In turn, the water swirling around Waterhouse's feet carries information about Nip propeller design and the deployment of their fleets--if only he had the wit to read it. The chaos of the waves, gravid with encrypted data, mocks him.

The land war is over for Waterhouse. Now he is gone, gone to the sea. This is the first time he's taken a good look at it--the sea, that is--since he reached Los Angeles. It looks big to him. Before, when he was at Pearl, it was just a blank, a nothing. Now it looks like an active participant and a vector of information. Fighting a war out on that thing could turn you into some kind of a maniac, make you deranged. What must it be like to be the General? To live for years among volcanoes and alien trees, to forget about oaks and cornfields and snowstorms and football games? To fight the terrible Nipponese in the jungle, burning them out of caves, driving them off cliffs into the sea? To be an oriental potentate--the supreme authority over millions of square miles, hundreds of millions of people. Your only tether to the real world a slender copper fiber rambling across the ocean floor, a faint bleating of dots and dashes in the night? What kind of man would this make you?

Chapter 51 OUTPOST

When their sergeant was aerosolized by the Australian with the tommy gun, Goto Dengo and his surviving comrades were left mapless, and mapless in the jungles of New Guinea during a war is bad, bad, bad.