Cryptonomicon (11 page)

The university computer system was better than no computer at all. But Randy was humiliated. Like every other high-powered academic computing network, this one was based on an industrial-strength operating system called UNIX, which had a learning curve like the Matterhorn, and lacked the cuddly and stylish features of the personal computers then coming into vogue. Randy had used it quite a bit as an undergraduate and knew his way around. Even so, learning how to write good code on the thing required a lot of time. His life had changed when Charlene had come along, and now it changed more: he dropped out of the fantasy role-playing game circuit altogether, stopped going to meetings of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and began to spend all of his free time either with Charlene or in front of a computer terminal. All in all, this was probably a change for the better. With Charlene, he did things he wouldn’t have done otherwise, like getting exercise, or going to see live music. And at the computer, he was learning new skills, and he was creating something. It might be something completely useless, but at least he was creating.

He spent a lot of time talking to Andrew Loeb, who actually went out and did the stuff he was writing programs for; he’d disappear for a few days and come back all wobbly and haggard, with fish scales caught in his whiskers or dried animal blood under his fingernails. He’d ram down a couple of Big Macs, sleep for twenty-four hours, then meet Randy in a bar (Charlene wasn’t comfortable with having him in the house) and talk learnedly of the difficulties of day-to-day life, aboriginal style. They argued about whether aborigines would eat the more disgusting parts of certain animals or throw them away. Andrew voted for yes. Randy disagreed—just because they were primitive didn’t mean they couldn’t have taste. Andrew accused him of being a romantic. Finally, to settle it, they went up into the mountains together, armed with nothing but knives and Andrew’s collection of exquisitely crafted vermin snares. By the third
night, Randy found himself seriously thinking about eating some insects. “Q.E.D.,” Andrew said.

Anyway, Randy finished his software after a year and a half. It was a success; Chester and Avi liked it. Randy was moderately pleased at having built something so complicated that actually worked, but he had no illusions about its being good for anything. He was sort of embarrassed at having wasted so much time and mental energy on the project. But he knew that if he hadn’t been writing code, he’d have spent the same amount of time playing games or going to Society for Creative Anachronism meetings in medieval drag, so it all zeroed out in the end. Spending the time in front of the computer was arguably better, because it had honed his programming skills, which had been pretty sharp to begin with. On the other hand, he’d done it all on the UNIX system, which was for scientists and engineers—not a savvy move in an age when all the money was in personal computers.

Chester and Randy had nicknamed Avi “Avid,” because he really, really liked fantasy games. Avi had always claimed that he played them as a way of understanding what it was really like to live in ancient times, and he was a maniac about historical authenticity. That was okay; they all had half-assed excuses, and Avi’s historical acumen frequently came in handy.

Not long after this, Avi graduated and disappeared, and popped up a few months later in Minneapolis, where he had gotten a job with a major publisher of fantasy role-playing games. He offered to buy Randy’s game software for the astonishingly large sum of $1000 plus a small cut of future profits. Randy accepted the offer in its general outlines, asked Avi to send him a contract, then went out and found Andrew boiling some fish guts in a birchbark kettle atop a Weber grill on the roof of the apartment building where he lived. He wanted to give Andrew the good news, and to cut him in on the proceeds. What ensued was a really unpleasant conversation, standing up there in a pelting, spitting, wind-blown rain.

To begin with, Andrew took this deal far more seriously than Randy did. Randy saw it as a windfall, a lark. Andrew,
who was the son of a lawyer, treated it as if it were a major corporate merger, and asked many tedious and niggling questions about the contract, which did not exist yet and which would probably cover a single piece of paper when it did. Randy didn’t realize it at the time, but by asking so many questions for which Randy had no answers, Andrew was, in effect, arrogating to himself the role of Business Manager. He was implicitly forming a business partnership with Randy that did not, in fact, exist.

Furthermore, Andrew didn’t have the first notion of how much time and effort Randy had put into writing the code. Or (as Randy was to realize later) maybe he did. In any case, Andrew assumed from the get-go that he would share a fifty-fifty split with Randy, which was wildly out of proportion to the work he’d actually done on the project. Basically, Andrew acted as if all of the work he’d ever done on the subject of aboriginal dining habits was a part of this undertaking, and that it entitled him to an equal split.

By the time Randy extricated himself from this conversation, his mind was reeling. He had gone in with one view of reality and been radically challenged by another one that was clearly preposterous; but after an hour of Andrew’s browbeating he was beginning to doubt himself. After two or three sleepless nights, he decided to call the whole thing off. A paltry few hundred dollars wasn’t worth all of this agony.

But Andrew (who was, by now, represented by an associate of his father’s Santa Barbara law firm) vehemently objected. He and Randy had, according to his lawyer, jointly created something that had economic value, and a failure on Randy’s part to sell it at market value amounted to taking money out of Andrew’s pocket. It had become an unbelievable Kafkaesque nightmare, and Randy could only withdraw to a corner table at his favorite pub, drink pints of stout (frequently in the company of Chester) and watch this fantastic psychodrama unfold. He had, he now realized, blundered into some serious domestic weirdness involving Andrew’s family. It turned out that Andrew’s parents were divorced and, long ago, had fought savagely over custody of him, their only child. Mom had turned into a hippie and
joined a religious cult in Oregon and taken Andrew with her. It was rumored that this cult engaged in sexual abuse of children. Dad had hired private dicks to kidnap Andrew back and then showered him with material possessions to demonstrate his superior love. There had followed an interminable legal battle in which Dad had hired some rather fringey psychotherapists to hypnotize Andrew and get him to dredge up repressed memories of unspeakable and improbable horrors.

This was just the executive summary of a weird life that Randy only learned about in bits and pieces as the years went on. Later, he was to decide that Andrew’s life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.

Anyway Randy had blundered into this life and become enveloped in the weirdness. One of the young eager beavers in Andrew’s dad’s law firm decided, as a preemptive move, to obtain copies of all of Randy’s computer files, which were still stored on the UW computer system. Needless to say, he went about it in a heavy-handed way, and when the university’s legal department began to receive his sullen letters, it responded by informing both Andrew’s lawyer, and Randy, that anyone who used the university’s computer system to create a commercial product had to split the proceeds with the university. So now Randy was getting ominous letters from not one but two groups of deadly lawyers. Andrew then threatened to sue him for having made this blunder, which had halved the value of Andrew’s share!

In the end, just to cut his losses and get out of it clean, Randy had to hire a lawyer of his own. The final cost to him was a hair more than five thousand dollars. The software was never sold to anyone, and indeed could not have been; it was so legally encumbered by that point that it would have been like trying to sell someone a rusty Volkswagen that had been dismantled and its parts hidden in attack dog kennels all over the world.

It was the only time in his life when he had ever thought
about suicide. He did not think about it very hard, or very seriously, but he did think about it.

When it was all over, Avi sent him a handwritten letter saying, “I enjoyed doing business with you and look forward to continuing our relationship both as friends and, should opportunities arise, as creative partners.”

L
AWRENCE
P
RITCHARD
W
ATERHOUSE AND THE REST
of the band are up on the deck of the
Nevada
one morning, playing the national anthem and watching the Stars and Stripes ratchet up the mast, when they are startled to find themselves in the midst of one hundred and ninety airplanes of unfamiliar design. Some of them are down low, traveling horizontally, and others are up high, plunging nearly straight down. The latter are going so fast that they appear to be falling apart; little bits are dropping off of them. It is terrible to see—some training exercise gone miserably awry. But they pull out of their suicidal trajectories in plenty of time. The bits that have fallen off of them plunge smoothly and purposefully, not tumbling and fluttering as chunks of debris would. They are coming down all over the place. Perversely, they all seem to be headed for the berthed ships. It is incredibly dangerous—they might hit someone! Lawrence is outraged.

There is a short-lived phenomenon taking place in one of the ships down the line. Lawrence turns to look at it. This is the first real explosion he’s ever seen and so it takes him a long time to recognize it as such. He can play the very hardest glockenspiel parts with his eyes closed, and
The Star Spangled Banner
is much easier to ding than to sing.

His scanning eyes fasten, not on the source of the explosion, but on a couple of airplanes that are headed right toward them, skimming just above the water. Each drops a long skinny egg and then their tailplanes visibly move and they angle upwards and pass overhead. The rising sun shines directly through the glass of their canopies. Lawrence is able
to look into the eyes of the pilot of one of the planes. He notes that it appears to be some sort of Asian gentleman.

This is an incredibly realistic training exercise—even down to the point of using ethnically correct pilots, and detonating fake explosives on the ships. Lawrence heartily approves. Things have just been too lax around this place.

A tremendous shock comes up through the deck of the ship, making his feet and legs feel as if he had just jumped off a ten-foot precipice onto solid concrete. But he’s just standing there flatfooted. It makes no sense at all.

The band has finished playing the national anthem and is looking about at the spectacle. Sirens and horns are speaking up all over the place, from the
Nevada,
from the
Arizona
in the next berth, from buildings onshore. Lawrence doesn’t see any antiaircraft fire going up, doesn’t see any familiar planes in the air. The explosions just keep coming. Lawrence wanders over to the rail and stares across a few yards of open water towards the
Arizona
.

Another one of those plunging airplanes drops a projectile that shoots straight down onto
Arizona
’s deck but then, strangely, vanishes. Lawrence blinks and sees that it has left a neat bomb-shaped hole in the deck, just like a panicky Warner Brothers cartoon character passing at high speed through a planar structure such as a wall or ceiling. Fire jets from that hole for about a microsecond before the whole deck bulges up, disintegrating, and turns into a burgeoning globe of fire and blackness. Waterhouse is vaguely aware of a lot of stuff coming at him really fast. It is so big that he feels more like he is falling into it. He freezes up. It goes by him, over him, and through him. A terrible noise pierces his skull, a chord randomly struck, discordant but not without some kind of deranged harmony. Musical qualities aside, it is so goddamned loud that it almost kills him. He claps his hands over his ears.

Still the noise is there, like red-hot knitting needles through the eardrums. Hell’s bells. He spins away from it, but it follows him. He has this big thick strap around his neck, sewn together at groin level where it supports a cup. Thrust into the cup is the central support of his glockenspiel, which stands in front of him like a lyre-shaped breast
plate, huge fluffy tassels dangling gaily from the upper corners. Oddly, one of the tassels is burning. That isn’t the only thing now wrong with the glockenspiel, but he can’t quite make it out because his vision keeps getting obscured by something that must be wiped away every few moments. All he knows is that the glockenspiel has eaten a huge quantum of pure energy and been kicked up to some incredibly high state never before achieved by such an instrument; it is a burning, glowing, shrieking, ringing, radiating monster, a comet, an archangel, a tree of flaming magnesium, strapped to his body, standing on his groin. The energy is transmitted down its humming, buzzing central axis, through the cup, and into his genitals, which would be tumescing in other circumstances.

Lawrence spends some time wandering aimlessly around the deck. Eventually he has to help open a hatch for some men, and then he realizes that his hands are still clapped over his ears, and have been for a long time except for when he was wiping stuff out of his eyes. When he takes them off, the ringing has stopped, and he no longer hears airplanes. He was thinking that he wanted to go belowdecks, because the bad things are coming from the sky and he would like to get some big heavy permanent-seeming stuff between him and it, but a lot of sailors are taking the opposite view. He hears that they have been hit by one and maybe two of something that rhymes with “torpedoes,” and that they are trying to raise steam. Officers and noncoms, black and red with smoke and blood, keep deputizing him for different, extremely urgent tasks that he doesn’t quite understand, not least because he keeps putting his hands over his ears.

Probably half an hour goes by before he hits upon the idea of discarding his glockenspiel, which is, after all, just getting in the way. It was issued to him by the Navy with any number of stern warnings about the consequences of misusing it. Lawrence is conscientious about this kind of thing, dating back to when he was first given organ-playing privileges in West Point, Virginia. But at this point, for the first time in his life, as he stands there watching the
Arizona
burn and sink, he just says to himself: Well, to heck with it! He takes that glockenspiel out of its socket and has one last look
at it, it is the last time in his life he will ever touch a glockenspiel. There is no point in saving it now anyway, he realizes; several of the bars have been bent. He flips it around and discovers that chunks of blackened, distorted metal have been impact-welded onto several of the bars. Really throwing caution to the winds now, he flings it overboard in the general direction of the
Arizona,
a military lyre of burnished steel that sings a thousand men to their resting places on the bottom of the harbor.

As it vanishes into a patch of burning oil, the second wave of attacking airplanes arrives. The Navy’s antiaircraft guns finally open up and begin to rain shells down into the surrounding community and blow up occupied buildings. He can see human-shaped flames running around in the streets, pursued by people with blankets.

The rest of the day is spent, by Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and the rest of the Navy, grappling with the fact that many two-dimensional structures on this and other ships, which were put into place to prevent various fluids from commingling (e.g. fuel and air) have holes in them, and not only that but a lot of shit is on fire too and things are more than a little smoky. Certain objects that are supposed to (a) remain horizontal and (b) support heavy things have ceased to do either.

Nevada
’s engineering section manages to raise steam in a couple of boilers and the captain tries to get the ship out of the harbor. As soon as she gets underway, she comes under concerted attack, mostly by dive bombers who are eager to sink her in the channel and block the harbor altogether. Eventually, the captain runs her aground rather than see this happen. Unfortunately, what
Nevada
has in common with most other naval vessels is that she is not really engineered to work from a stationary position, and consequently she is hit three more times by dive bombers. So it is a pretty exciting morning overall. As a member of the band who does not even have his instrument any more, Lawrence’s duties are quite poorly defined, and he spends more time than he should watching the airplanes and the explosions. He has gone back to his earlier train of thought regarding societies and their efforts to outdo each other. It is very clear to him,
as wave after wave of Nipponese dive bombers hurl themselves, with calligraphic precision, at the ship he is standing on, and as the cream of his society’s navy burns and explodes and sinks, putting up virtually no resistance, that his society is going to have to rethink a thing or two.

At some point he burns his hand on something. It is his right hand, which is preferable—he is left-handed. Also, he becomes more clearly aware that a portion of
Arizona
has tried to take his scalp off. These are minor injuries by Pearl Harbor standards and he does not stay long in the hospital. The doctor warns him that the skin on his hand might contract and limit his fingers’ range of motion. As soon as he can withstand the pain, Lawrence begins to play Bach’s
Art of Fugue
in his lap whenever he is not otherwise occupied. Most of those tunes start out simple; you can easily picture old Johann Sebastian sitting there on the bench on a cold morning in Leipzig, one or two blockflöte stops yanked out, left hand in his lap, a fat choirboy or two over in the corner heaving away on the bellows, faint gasping noises coming from all the leaks in the works, and Johann’s right hand wandering aimlessly across the forbidding simplicity of the Great manual, stroking those cracked and yellowed elephant tusks, searching for some melody he hadn’t already invented. That is good stuff for Lawrence right now, and so he makes his right hand go through the same motions as Johann’s, even though it is a gauze-wrapped hand and he is using an upside-down dinner tray as a substitute for the keyboard, and he has to hum the music under his breath. When he really gets into it, his feet skid around and piston under the sheets, playing imaginary pedals, and his neighbors complain.

He is out of the hospital in a few days, just in time for him and the rest of
Nevada
’s band to begin their new, wartime assignment. This was evidently something of a poser for the Navy’s manpower experts. These musicians were (from a killing-Nips point of view) completely useless to begin with. As of 7 December, they no longer have even a functioning ship and most of them have lost their clarinets.

Still, it isn’t all about loading shells and pulling triggers. No large organization can kill Nips in any kind of systematic way without doing a nearly unbelievable amount of typing and filing. It is logical to suppose that men who can play the clarinet will not botch that kind of work any worse than anyone else. And so Waterhouse and his bandmates receive orders assigning them to what would appear to be one of the typing-and-filing branches of the Navy.

This is located in a building, not a ship. There are quite a few Navy people who sneer at the whole idea of working in a building, and Lawrence and some of the other recent recruits, eager to fit in, have gotten into the habit of copping the same attitude. But now that they have seen what happens to a ship when you detonate hundreds of pounds of high explosive on, in, and around it, Waterhouse and many others are reassessing their feelings about working in buildings. They report to their new post with high morale.

Their new commanding officer is not so cheerful, and his feelings appear to be shared by everyone in the entire section. The musicians are greeted without being welcomed and saluted without being honored. The people who have been working in this building—far from being overawed by their status as guys who not only worked on an actual ship until recently but
furthermore
have been very close to things that were exploding, burning, etc., and not as the result of routine lapses in judgment but because bad men deliberately made it happen—do not seem to feel that Lawrence and his bandmates
deserve
to be entrusted with this new work, whatever the hell it is.

Glumly, almost despairingly, the commanding officer and his subordinates get the musicians squared away. Even if they don’t have enough desks to go around, each man can at least have a chair at a table or counter. Some ingenuity is displayed in finding places for all the new arrivals. It is clear that these people are trying their best at what they consider to be a hopeless task.

Then there is some talk about secrecy. A
great deal
of talk about it. They run through drills intended to test their ability to
throw things away
properly. This goes on for a
long
time and the longer it continues, without an explanation as to
why, the more mysterious it becomes. The musicians, who were at first a little put out by their chilly reception, start to speculate amongst themselves as to what kind of an operation they have gotten themselves into now.

Finally, one morning, the musicians are assembled in a classroom in front of the cleanest chalkboard Waterhouse has ever seen. The last few days have imbued him with just enough paranoia that he suspects it is that clean for a reason—erasing chalkboards is not to be taken lightly during wartime.

They are seated in little chairs with desks attached to them, desks designed for right-handers. Lawrence puts his notepad in his lap, then rests his bandaged right hand on the desk and begins to play a ditty from
Art of Fugue,
grimacing and even grunting with pain as his burned skin stretches and slides over his knuckles.

Someone chucks him on the shoulder. He opens his eyes to see that he is the only person in the room sitting down; an officer is on the deck. He stands up and his weak leg nearly buckles. When he finally gets himself fully to his feet, he sees that the officer (if he even
is
an officer) is out of uniform.
Way
out of uniform. He’s wearing a bathrobe and smoking a pipe. The bathrobe is extraordinarily worn, and not in the sense of, say, a hospital or hotel bathrobe that gets laundered frequently. This thing hasn’t been laundered in a long time, but boy has it seen some
use
. The
elbows
are worn out and the bottom of the right sleeve is ashy grey and slippery with graphite from being dragged back and forth, tens of thousands of times, across sheets of paper dense with number-two pencil work. The terrycloth has a dandruffy appearance, but it has nothing to do with exfoliation of the scalp; these flakes are way too big, and too geometric: rectangles and circular dots of oaktag, punched out of cards and tape respectively. The pipe went out a long time ago and the officer (or whatever he is) is not even pretending to worry about getting it relit. It is there just to give him something to bite down on, which he does as vigorously as a civil war infantryman having a leg sawed off.