Cryptonomicon

"At sea--off the northeast end of Palawan. They transmitted this." He waves one of the sheets. "Then, almost immediately, a transmitter in Manila came on the air, and sent this." He waves the other sheet.

"Does Colonel Comstock know about this?"

"Oh, yes sir! He was just leaving for the day when the messages came through. He's been on the horn to his huffduff people, the Air Force, the whole bit. He thinks we've got the bastards!"

"Well, before you get carried away celebrating, could you do me a favor?"

"Yes, sir!"

"What did you do with all of the original intercept sheets for the archived Arethusa messages?"

"They're filed, sir. Do you want to see them?"

"Yes. All of them. I need to check them against the versions on the ETC cards. If Arethusa works the way I think it does, then even a single mistranscribed letter could render all of my calculations useless."

"I'll go and fetch them, sir! I'm not going home anyway.

"You're not?"

"Why, no sir! I want to wait around and see how it all comes out with that darned submarine."

Waterhouse goes to the oven and takes out a brick of hot, blank ETC cards. He has learned that he has to keep the cards hot, or else they will soak up the tropical humidity and jam the machinery; so before he moved the digital computer into this room, he insisted that a whole bank of ovens be installed.

He drops the hot cards into the hopper of a card punching machine, sits down at the keyboard, and clips the first intercept sheet up in front of him. He begins to punch the letters into it, one by one. It is a short message; it fits onto three cards. Then he begins punching in the second message.

The lieutenant comes in carrying a cardboard box. "All of the original Arethusa intercept sheets."

"Thank you, Lieutenant."

The lieutenant looks over his shoulder. "Can I help you transcribing those messages?"

"No. The best way for you to help me would be to refill my water pitcher and then don't bother me for the rest of the night. I have a bee in my bonnet about this Arethusa business."

"Yes, sir!" says the lieutenant, insufferably cheerful about the fact that the mystery submarine is, even now, on the run from Catalina bombers.

Waterhouse finishes punching in the second message, though he already knows what it would say if it were decrypted: "TRAP REPEAT TRAP DO NOT TRANSMIT STOP HUFFDUFF UNITS NEARBY."

He takes those cards out of the puncher's output tray and places them neatly in the box along with the cards containing all of the previous Arethusa messages. He then takes the entire contents of this box--a brick of messages about a foot thick--and puts them into his attache case.

He unclips the two fresh intercept slips from the card puncher and puts them on top of the stack of older slips. The brick of cards in his attache case, and the pile of slips in his hand, contain exactly the same information. They are the only copies in all the world. He flips through them to make sure that they contain all of the critical intercepts--such as the long message giving the location of Golgotha, and the one that mentions Goto Dengo's initials. He puts the whole stack of slips on top of one of the ovens.

He dumps a foot-thick stack of hot blank cards into the input hopper of the card punch. He connects the punch's control cable up to the digital computer, so that the computer can control it.

Then he starts the program he has written, the one that generates random numbers according to Turing's function. Lights flash, and the card reader whirrs, as the program is loaded into the computer's RAM. Then it pauses, waiting for input: the function needs a seed. A stream of bits that will get it going. Any seed will do. Waterhouse thinks about it for a moment, and then types in COMSTOCK.

The card punch rumbles into action. The stack of blanks begins to get shorter. Punched cards skitter into the output tray. When it's finished, Waterhouse pulls one of them out, holds it up to the light, and looks at the pattern of tiny rectangular holes punched out of the manila. A constellation of doorways.

"It'll look like any other encrypted message," he explained to Goto Dengo, up on the bleachers, "but the, uh, the crypto boys" (he almost said the NSA) "can run their computers on them forever and never break the code--because there isno code."

He puts this stack of freshly punched cards into the box labeled ARETHUSA INTERCEPTS, and puts it back in its place on the shelf.

Finally, before leaving the lab, he goes back over to that oven, and slides the corner of that stack of intercept sheets very close to a pilot light. It is reluctant to catch, so he gives it some help with a flick of his Zippo. He stands back and watches the pile burn for a while, until he's sure that all of the strange information on those sheets has been destroyed.

Then he goes out into the hallway in search of a fire extinguisher. Upstairs, he can hear Comstock's boys, gathered around the radio, baying like hounds.

Chapter 101 PASSAGE