Cryptonomicon

The function requires a number of inputs. One of these is a date. Azure is a system for generating one-time pads that change every day, and circumstantial evidence from the room of the dead abacus slaves tells him that, at the moment of their death, they were working on the one time pad for 6 August 1945, which is four months in the future. Waterhouse writes it down in the European style (day of the month first, then month) as 06081945, then lops off the leading zero to get 6,081,945--a pure quantity, an integer, unmarred by decimal point, rounding error, or any of the other compromises so abhorrent to number theorists. He uses this as one of the inputs to the zeta function. The zeta function requires a fewother inputs too, which the person who designed this cryptosystem (presumably Rudy) was at liberty to choose. Surmising which inputs Rudy used has occupied much of Waterhouse's thoughts in the last week. He puts in the numbers he has guessed, anyway, which is a matter of converting them to binary notation and then physically incarnating those ones and zeros on a neat row of stainless-steel toggle switches: down for zero, up for one.

Finally he puts on his artilleryman's ear protectors and lets the Digital Computer howl through the calculation. The room gets much hotter. A vacuum tube burns out, and then another one. Waterhouse replaces them. That's easy because Lieutenant Colonel Comstock has made a basically infinite supply of tubes available to him--quite a remarkable feat during wartime. The filaments of all those massed tubes glow redly and shine palpable radiant heat across the room. The smell of hot oil rises from the louvers on the ETC card machines. The stack of blank cards in the input hopper shortens mysteriously as they vanish into the machine. Cards skitter into the output bin. Waterhouse pulls them out and looks at them. His heart is pounding very hard.

It's quiet again. The cards have numbers on them, nothing more. They just happen to be exactly the same numbers that were frozen on certain abaci down in the room of the computer slaves.

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has just demolished another enemy cryptosystem: Azure/Pufferfish may now be mounted like a stuffed head on the wall of the Basement. And indeed, looking at those numbers he feels the same kind of letdown that a big game hunter must feel when he's stalked some legendary beast halfway across Africa and finally brought it down with a slug through the heart, walked up to the corpse, and discovered that after all it's just a big, messy, pile of meat. It's dirty and it's got flies on it. Is that all there is to it? Why didn't he solve this thing a long time ago? All of the old Azure/Pufferfish intercepts can be decrypted now. He'll have to read them, and they will turn out to be the usual numb mutterings of giant bureaucracies trying to take over the world. He doesn't, frankly, care anymore. He just wants to get the hell out of here and get married, play the organ, and program his Digital Computer, and hopefully get someone to pay him a salary to do one or the other. But Mary's in Brisbane and the war's not over yet--we haven't even gotten around to invading Nippon, for crissakes, and conquering the place is going to take forever,with all those plucky Nipponese women and children drilling on soccer fields with pointed bamboo staves--and it's probably going to be something like 1955 before he can even get discharged from the military. The war is not over yet, and as long as it goes on they will need him to stay down here in the Basement doing more of what he just did.

Arethusa. He still hasn't broken Arethusa. Now that'sa cryptosystem! He's too tired. He can't break Arethusa just now.

What he really needs is someone to talk to. Not about anything in particular. Just to talk. But there's only half a dozen people on the planet he can really talk to, and none of them is in the Philippines. Fortunately, there are long copper wires running underneath the oceans which made geographical location irrelevant, as long as you have the right clearance. Waterhouse does. He gets up and leaves the Basement and goes to have a chat with his friend Alan.

Chapter 92 AKIHABARA

As Randy's plane banks into Narita, a low stratum of cloud screens the countryside like a silk veil. It must be Nippon: the only two colors are the orange of the earth-moving equipment and the green of the earth that has not yet been moved. Other than that, everything is greyscale: grey parking lots divided into rectangles by white lines, the rectangles occupied with black, white, or grey cars, fading off into silvery fog beneath a sky the color of aviation alloy. Nippon is soothing, a good destination for a man who has just been rousted from his jail cell, hauled up before a judge, tongue-lashed, driven to the airport, and expelled from the Philippines.