Cryptonomicon

"Or," von Hacklheber says, "suppose she looks at the cage, and sees how the balls are distributed inside of it, and thencloses her eyes. She will subconsciously reach toward the E and avoid the Z. Or, if a certain letter has just come up recently, she will try to avoid choosing it again. Even if she cannot see the inside of the cage, she will learn to distinguish among the different balls by their feel--being made of wood, each ball will have a different weight, a different pattern in the grain."

Bischoff's not buying it. "But it will still be mostly random!"

"Mostly random is not good enough!" von Hacklheber snaps. "I was convinced that the one-time pads of Detachment 2702 would have a frequency distribution similar to that of the King James Version of the Bible, for example. And I strongly suspected that the content of those messages would include words such as Waterhouse, Turing, Enigma, Qwghlm, Malta. By putting my machinery to work, I was able to break some of the one-time pads. Waterhouse was careful to burn his pads after using them once, but some other parts of the detachment were careless, and used the same pads again and again. I read many messages. It was obvious that Detachment 2702 was in the business of deceiving the Wehrmacht by concealing the fact that the Enigma had been broken."

Shaftoe knows what an Enigma is, if only because Bischoff won't shut up about them. When von Hacklheber explains this, everything that Detachment 2702 ever did suddenly makes sense.

"So, the secret is out then," Root says. "I assume you made your superiors aware of your discovery?"

"I made them aware of absolutely nothing," von Hacklheber snarls, "because by this time I had long since fallen into a snare of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. I had become his pawn, his slave, and had ceased to feel any loyalty whatsoever towards the Reich."

***

The knock on Rudolf von Hacklheber's door had come at four o'clock in the morning, a time exploited by the Gestapo for its psychological effect. Rudy is wide awake. Even if bombers had not been pounding Berlin all night long, he would have been awake, because he has neither seen nor heard from Angelo in three days. He throws a dressing gown over his pajamas, steps into slippers, and opens the door of his flat to reveal, predictably, a small, prematurely withered man backed up by a couple of classic Gestapo killers in long black leather coats.

"May I proffer an observation?" says Rudy von Hacklheber.

"But of course, Herr Doktor Professor. As long as it is not a state secret, of course."

"In the old days--the early days--when no one knew what the Gestapo was, and no one was afraid of it, this four in the morning business was clever. A fine way to exploit man's primal fear of the darkness. But now it is 1942, almost 1943, and everyone is afraid of the Gestapo. Everyone. More than they are of the dark. So, why don't you work during the daytime? You are stuck in a rut."

The bottom half of the withered man's face laughs. The top half doesn't change. "I will pass your suggestion up the chain of command," he says. "But, Herr Doktor, we are not here to instill fear. We have come at this inconvenient time because of the train schedules."

"Am I to understand that I am getting on a train?"

"You have a few minutes," the Gestapo man says, pulling back a cuff to divulge a hulking Swiss chronometer. Then he invites himself in and begins to pace up and down in front of Rudy's bookshelves, hands clasped behind his back, bending at the waist to peer at the titles. He seems disappointed to find that they are all mathematical texts--not a single copy of the Declaration of Independence in evidence, though you can never tell when a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion might be hidden between the pages of a mathematical journal. When Rudy emerges, dressed but still unshaven, he finds the man displaying a pained expression while trying to read Turing's dissertation on the Universal Machine. He looks like a lower primate trying to fly an aeroplane.

Half an hour later, they are at the train station. Rudy looks up at the departures board as they go in, and memorizes its contents, so that he will be able to deduce, from the track number, whether he's being taken in the direction of Leipzig or Konigsberg or Warsaw.

It is a clever thing to do, but it turns out to be a waste of effort, because the Gestapo men lead him to a track that is not listed on the board. A short train waits there. It does not contain any boxcars, a relief to Rudy, since he thinks that during the last few years he may have glimpsed boxcars that appeared to be crammed full of human beings. These glimpses were brief and surreal, and he cannot really sort out whether they really happened, or were merely fragments of nightmares that got filed in the wrong cranial drawer.