Cryptonomicon

No, it is not an illusion. Real smoke is curling up from the spinning drums. The tape is running through the machine so fast that it is catching fire before the eyes of Waterhouse and the men inside, who watch it calmly, as if it were smoking in an entirely new and interesting way.

If there is a machine in the world capable of reading data from a tape that fast, Waterhouse has never heard of it.

The black shutter slams home. Just as it does, Waterhouse gets one fragmentary glimpse of another object standing in the corner of the room: a steel rack in which a large number of grey cylindrical objects are stored in neat rows.

Two motorcyclists come through the courtyard at once, running in the darkness with their headlights off. Waterhouse jogs after them for a bit, leaving the picturesque old courtyard behind and entering into the world of the huts, the new structures thrown up in the last year or two. "Hut" makes him think of a tiny thing, but these huts, taken together, are more like that new Pentagon thing that the War Department has been putting up across the river from D.C. They embody a blunt need for space unfiltered through any aesthetic or even human considerations.

Waterhouse walks to an intersection of roads where he thought he heard the motorcycles making a turn, and stops, hemmed in by blast walls. On an impulse, he clambers to the top of a wall and takes a seat. The view from here is no better. He knows that thousands of people are at work all around him in these huts, but he sees none of them, there are no signposts.

He is still trying to work out that business that he saw through the window.

The tape was running so fast that it smoked.There is no point of driving it that fast unless the machine can read the information that fast--transforming the pattern of holes in the tape into electrical impulses.

But why bother, if those impulses had nowhere to go? No human mind could deal with a stream of characters coming in at that speed. No teletype that Waterhouse knew of could even print them out.

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.