Cryptonomicon Page 28

  It only makes sense if they are constructing a machine. A mechanical calculator of some sort that can absorb the data and then do something with it—perform some calculation—presumably a cipher-breaking type of calculation.

  Then he remembers the rack he glimpsed in the corner, its many rows of identical grey cylinders. Viewed end-on, they looked like some kind of ammunition. But they are too smooth and glossy for that. Those cylinders, Waterhouse realizes, are made of blown glass.

  They are vacuum tubes. Hundreds of them. More tubes in one place than Waterhouse has ever seen.

  Those men in that room are building a Turing machine!

  It is no wonder, then, that the men in the room accept the burning of the tape so calmly. That strip of paper, a technology as old as the pyramids, is merely a vessel for a stream of information. When it passes through the machine, the information is abstracted from it, transfigured into a pattern of pure binary data. That the mere vessel burns is of no consequence. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—the data has passed out of the physical plane and into the mathematical, a higher and purer universe where different laws apply. Laws, a few of which are dimly and imperfectly known to Dr. Alan Mathison Turing and Dr. John von Neumann and Dr. Rudolf von Hacklheber and a few other people Waterhouse used to hang around with in Princeton. Laws about which Waterhouse himself knows a thing or two.

  Once you have transfigured the data into the realm of pure information, all that is required is a tool. Carpenters work with wood and carry a box of technology for measuring it, cutting it, smoothing it, joining it. Mathematicians work with information and need a tool of their own.

  They have been building these tools, one at a time, for years. There is, just to name one example, a cash register and typewriter company called the Electrical Till Corporation that makes a dandy punched-card machine for tabulating large quantities of data. Waterhouse’s professor in Iowa was tired of solving differential equations one at a time and invented a machine to solve them automatically by storing the information on a capacitor-covered drum and cranking through a certain algorithm. Given enough time and enough vacuum tubes, a tool might be invented to sum a column of numbers, and another one to keep track of inventories, and another one to alphabetize lists of words. A well-equipped business would have one of each: gleaming cast-iron monsters with heat waves rising out of their grilles, emblazoned with logos like ETC and Siemens and Hollerith, each carrying out its own specialized task. Just as a carpenter had a miter box and a dovetail jig and a clawhammer in his box.

  Turing figured out something entirely different, something unspeakably strange and radical.

  He figured out that mathematicians, unlike carpenters, only needed to have one tool in their toolbox, if it were the right sort of tool. Turing realized that it should be possible to build a meta-machine that could be reconfigured in such a way that it would do any task you could conceivably do with information. It would be a protean device that could turn into any tool you could ever need. Like a pipe organ changing into a different instrument every time you hit a preset button.

  The details were a bit hazy. This was not a blueprint for an actual machine, rather a thought experiment that Turing had dreamed up in order to resolve an abstract riddle from the completely impractical world of pure logic. Waterhouse knows this perfectly well. But he cannot get one thing out of his mind as he sits there atop the blast walls at the dark intersection in Bletchley Park: the Turing machine, if one really existed, would rely upon having a tape. The tape would pass through the machine. It would carry the information that the machine needed to do its work.

  Waterhouse sits there staring off into the darkness and reconstructs Turing’s machine in his mind. More of the details are coming back to him. The tape, he now recollects, would not move through the Turing machine in one direction; it would change direction frequently. And the Turing machine would not just read the tape; it would be able to erase marks or make new ones.

  Clearly you cannot erase holes in a paper tape. And just as clearly the tape only moves through this Bletchley Park machine in one direction. So, much as Waterhouse hates to admit this fact to himself, the rack of tubes he just spied is not a Turing machine. It is some lesser device—a special-purpose tool like a punched-card reader or Atanasoff’s differential equation solver.

  It is still bigger and more fiendishly terrific than anything Waterhouse has ever seen.

  A night train from Birmingham blows through, carrying bullets to the sea. As its sound dies away to the south, a motorcycle approaches the park’s main gate. Its engine idles as the rider’s papers are checked, then Waterhouse hears a Bronx cheer as it surges forward and cuts the sharp turn into the lane. Waterhouse climbs to his feet at the intersection of the walls, and watches carefully as the bike sputters past him and homes in on a “hut” a couple of blocks away. Light suddenly leaks from an open door as the cargo changes hands. Then the light is snuffed and the bike stretches a long loud raspberry down the road to the park’s exit.

  Waterhouse lets himself down to earth and gropes his way down the road through the moonless night. He stops before the entrance to the hut and listens to it teem for a minute. Then, working up his courage, he steps forward and pushes the wooden door open.

  It is unpleasantly hot in here, and the atmosphere is a nauseating distillation of human and machine odors, held in and concentrated by the coffin doors slabbed down over all the windows. Many people are in here, mostly women working at gargantuan electrically powered typewriters. He can see even through his squint that the place is a running sluice for scraps of paper, maybe four by six inches each, evidently brought in by the motorcyclists. Near the door, they have been sorted and stacked up in wire baskets. Thence they go to the women at their giant typewriters.

  One of the few men in the place has risen to his feet and is homing in on Waterhouse. He is about Waterhouse’s age, that is, in his early twenties. He is wearing a British Army uniform. He has the air of a host at a wedding reception who wants to make sure that even the most long-lost, far-flung members of the family are properly greeted. Obviously he is no more a real military man than is Waterhouse himself. No wonder this place is surrounded by so much barbed wire and RAF men with machine guns.

  “Good evening, sir. Can I help you?”

  “Evening. Lawrence Waterhouse.”

  “Harry Packard. Pleased to meet you.” But he has no idea who Waterhouse is; he is privy to Ultra, but not to Ultra Mega.

  “Pleasure’s mine. I imagine you’ll want to have a look at this.” Waterhouse hands him the magic pass. Packard’s pale eyes travel over it carefully, then jump around to focus on a few sites of particular interest: the signature at the bottom, the smeared stamp. The war has turned Harry Packard into a machine for scanning and processing slips of paper and he goes about his work calmly and without fuss in this case. He excuses himself, works the crank on a telephone, and speaks to someone; his posture and facial expression suggest it is someone important. Waterhouse cannot hear the words above the clicking and thrumming of the massed typewriters, but he sees interest and bemusement on Packard’s young, open, pink face. Packard gives Waterhouse a sidelong glance or two while he is listening to the person at the other end of the line. Then he says something respectful and reassuring into the phone and rings off.

  “Right. Well, what would you like to see?”

  “I’m trying to get an overall sense of how the information flows.”

  “Well, we are close to the beginning of it here—these are the headwaters. Our wellsprings are the Y Service—military and amateur radio operators who listen in on Jerry’s radio transmissions, and provide us with these.” Packard takes a slip from a motorcyclist’s pannier and hands it to Waterhouse.

  It is a form with various boxes at the top in which someone has written in a date (today’s) and time (a couple of hours ago) and a few other data such as a radio frequency. The body of the form is mostly occupied by a large open space in which the following has bee
n printed in hasty block letters:

  A Y W B P

  R O J H K

  D H A O B

  Q T M D L

  T U S H I

  Y P I J S

  L L E N J

  O P S K Y

  V Z P D L

  E M A O U

  T A M O G

  T M O A H

  E C

  the whole thing preceded by two groups of three letters each:

  Y U H A B G

  “This one came in from one of our stations in Kent,” Packard says. “It is a Chaffinch message.”

  “So—one of Rommel’s?”

  “Yes. This intercept came in from Cairo. Chaffinch gets top priority, which is why this message is on the top of the pile.”

  Packard leads Waterhouse down the central aisle of the hut, between the rows of typists. He picks out one girl who is just finishing up with a message, and hands her the slip. She sets it up next to her machine and commences typing it in.

  At first glance, Waterhouse had thought that the machines represented some British concept of how to build an electric typewriter—as big as a dinner table, wrapped up in two hundred pounds of cast-iron, a ten-horse motor turning over under the hood, surrounded by tall fences and armed guards. But now that he is closer he sees that it is something much more complicated. Instead of a platen, it has a large flat reel on it carrying a roll of narrow paper tape. This is not the same kind of tape he saw earlier, smoking through the big machine. This is narrower, and when it emerges from the machine, it does not have holes punched through it for a machine to read. Instead, every time the girl slams down one of the keys on the keyboard—copying the text printed on the slip—a new letter is printed on the tape. But not the same letter that she typed.

  It does not take her long to type in all of the letters. Then she tears the tape from her machine. It has a sticky backing which she uses to paste it directly onto the original intercept slip. She hands it to Packard, giving him a demure smile. He responds with something between a nod and a smart little bow, the kind of thing no American male could ever get away with. He glances at it and hands it to Waterhouse.

  The letters on the tape say

  EINUNDZWANZIGSTPANZERDIVISIONBERICHTETKEINEBESONDEREEREIGNISSE

  “In order to obtain those settings, you have to break the code—which changes every day?”

  Packard smiles in agreement. “At midnight. If you stay here—” he checks his watch “—for another four hours, you will see fresh intercepts coming in from the Y Service that will produce utter gibberish when we run them through the Typex, because the Jerries will have changed all their codes on the stroke of midnight. Rather like Cinderella’s magic carriage turning back into a pumpkin. We must then analyze the new intercepts using the bombes, and figure out the day’s new codes.”

  “How long does that take?”

  “Sometimes we are lucky and have broken the day’s codes by two or three o’clock in the morning. Typically it does not happen until afternoon or evening. Sometimes we do not succeed at all.”

  “Okay, this is a stupid question, but I want to be clear. These Typex machines—which merely do a mechanical deciphering operation—are a completely different thing from the bombes, which actually break the codes.”

  “The bombes, compared to these, are of a completely different, enormously higher order of sophistication,” Packard agrees. “They are almost like mechanical thinking machines.”

  “Where are they located?”

  “Hut 11. But they won’t be running just now.”

  “Right,” Waterhouse says, “not until after midnight when the carriage turns back into a pumpkin, and you need to break tomorrow’s Enigma settings.”

  “Precisely.”

  Packard steps over to a small wooden hatch set low into one of the hut’s exterior walls. Next to it sits an office tray with a cup hook screwed into each end, and a string tied to each cup hook. One of the strings is piled up loose on the floor. The wall hatch has been slid shut on the other string. Packard puts the message slip on top of a pile of similar ones that has accumulated in the tray, then slides the hatch open, revealing a narrow tunnel leading away from the hut.

  “Okay, your pull!” he shouts.

  “Okay, my pull!” comes an answering voice a moment later. The string goes taught and the tray slides into the tunnel and disappears.

  “On its way to Hut 3,” Packard explains.

  “Then so am I,” Waterhouse says.

  Hut 3 is only a few yards away, on the other side of the inevitable blast wall. GERMAN MILITARY SECTION has been scrawled on the door in cursive; Waterhouse presumes that this is as opposed to “NAVAL” which is in Hut 4. The ratio of men to women seems higher here. During wartime it is startling to see so many hale young men in one room together. Some are in Army or RAF uniforms, some in civvies, and there is even one Naval officer.

  A large horseshoe-shaped table dominates the center of the building, with a rectangular table off to the side. Each chair at each table is occupied by intent workers. The intercept slips are pulled into the hut on the wooden tray and then move from chair to chair according to some highly organized scheme that Waterhouse can only vaguely grasp at this point. Someone explains to him that the bombes just broke the day’s codes around sundown, and so the entire day’s load of intercepts has just come down the tunnel from Hut 6 during the last couple of hours.

  He decides to think of the hut as a mathematical black box for the time being—that is, he’ll concentrate only on its inputs and outputs of information and ignore the internal details. Bletchley Park, taken in its entirety, is a black box of sorts: random letters stream into it, strategic intelligence streams out, and the internal particulars are of no interest to most of the people on the Ultra distribution list. The question that Waterhouse is here to figure out is: is there another vector of information coming out of this place, hidden subliminally in the teletype signals and the behaviors of the Allied commanders? And does it point to Rudolf von Hacklheber, Ph.D.?

  KINAKUTA

  * * *

  WHOEVER LAID OUT THE FLIGHT PATHS INTO THE Sultan’s new airport must have been in cahoots with the Kinakuta Chamber of Commerce. If you’re lucky enough to be in a window seat on the left side of the plane, as Randy Waterhouse is, the view during the final approach looks like a propaganda flyby.

  Kinakuta’s matted green slopes surge out of a mostly calm blue sea, and eventually soar high enough to be dusted with snow at the summits, even though the island is only seven degrees north of the equator. Randy sees right away what Avi meant when he said that the place was Muslim around the edges and animist in the middle. The only places you could hope to build anything like a modern city are along the coast, where there’s an intermittent fringe of nearly flat land—a beige rind clinging to a giant emerald. The biggest and best flat place is on the northeastern corner of the island, where the main river, several miles inland, bottoms out into a flood plain that broadens to an alluvial delta that reaches out into the Sulu Sea for a mile or two.

  Randy gives up counting the oil rigs ten minutes before Kinakuta City even comes into sight. From high above they look like flaming tank traps scattered in the surf to deter incoming Marines. As the plane sheds altitude they begin to look more like factories on stilts, topped with high stacks where troublesome natural gas is flamed off. This gets more alarming as the plane gets closer to the water, and it begins to seem as if the pilot is threading his way between pillars of fire that would roast the 777 like a pigeon on the wing.

  Kinakuta City looks more modern than anything in the States. He has been trying to read about the place but has found precious little: a couple of encyclopedia entries, a few fleeting mentions in World War II histories, some puckish but basically glowing articles in the Economist. Putting his rusty interlibrary loan skills to work, he paid the Library of Congress to make him a photocopy of the one book he could find specifically about Kinakuta: one of about a million out-of-print World War
II memoirs that must have been penned by G.I.s during the late forties and fifties. So far, he hasn’t had time to read it, and so the two-inch stack of pages is just dead weight in his luggage.

  In any case, none of the maps he has seen tallies with the reality of the modern Kinakuta City. Anything that was there during the war has been torn down and replaced with new. The river has been dredged into a new channel. An inconvenient mountain called Eliza Peak has been dynamited, and the rubble shoved into the ocean to make several new square miles of real estate, most of which has been gobbled by the new airport. The dynamitings were so loud that they prompted complaints from the governments of the Philippines and of Borneo, hundreds of miles away. They also brought down the wrath of Greenpeace, which was afraid that the sultan was scaring whales in the central Pacific. So Randy expects half of Kinakuta City to be a smoking crater, but of course it’s not. The stump of Eliza Peak has been neatly paved over and used as the foundation of the sultan’s new Technology City. All of the glass-walled skyscrapers there, and in the rest of the city, have pointy tops, recalling a traditional architecture that has long since been bulldozed and used to fill in the harbor. The only building Randy can see that looks to be more than ten years old is the sultan’s palace, which is ancient. Surrounded by miles of blue glass skyscrapers, it’s like a reddish-beige mote frozen in a tray of ice.

  Once Randy fixes on that, everything snaps into its proper orientation. He bends forward, risks the censure of the cabin crew by pulling his bag out from under the seat ahead of him, and pulls out his photocopied G.I. memoir. One of its first pages is a map of Kinakuta City as it appeared in 1945, and dead center is the Sultan’s Palace. Randy rotates it before his face in the way of a panicky driver with a steering wheel, and gets it to line up with his view. There’s the river. There’s Eliza Peak, where the Nipponese used to have a signals intelligence detachment and a radar station, all built with slave labor. There’s the former site of the Japanese Naval Air Force field, which became the Kinakuta Airport until the new one was built. Now it is a flock of yellow cranes above a blue nebula of rebar, lit from within by a constellation of flickering white stars—arc-welders at work.