Cryptonomicon

Everyone within ten miles--basically, the entire civilian population of Qwghlm, or, to put it another way, the entire Qwghlmian race-can see the new huffduff antenna rising from the mast on the castle. They are not stupid people and some of them, at least, must understand that the damn thing doesn't do any good if it is always pointed in the same direction. If it's not moving, it's not working. And if it's not working, then just what the hell is going on up there in the castle anyway?

So Waterhouse has to move it. He lives in the chapel, sleeping--when he sleeps--in a hammock strung at a perilous altitude above the floor ("skerries" are excellent jumpers, he has found).

If he sleeps during the daytime, even casual observers in the town will notice that the antenna does not move. That's no good. But he can't sleep at night, when the Germans bounce their transmissions off the ionosphere between the U-boats in the North Atlantic and their bases in Bordeaux and Lorient because a really close observer--say an insomniacal castle worker, or a German spy up in the rocks with a pair of binoculars--will suspect that the immobile huffduff antenna is just a cover story. So Waterhouse tries to split the difference by sleeping for a few hours around dusk and another few hours around dawn--a plan that does not go over well with his body. And when he gets up, he has absolutely nothing to look forward to besides sitting at the huffduff console for eight or twelve hours at a stretch, watching the breath come out of his mouth, twiddling the antenna, listening to--nothing!

He freely stipulates that he is a selfish bastard for feeling sorry for himself when other men are being blown to bits.

Having gotten that out of the way, what is he going to do to stay sane? He has got his routine down pat: leave the antenna pointed generally westwards for a while, then swing it back and forth in diminishing arcs, pretending to zero in on a U-boat, then leave it sitting for a while and do jumping jacks to warm back up. He has ditched his uniform for raiments of warm Qwghlmian wool. Every once in a while, at totally unpredictable intervals, members of the castle staff will burst in on him with an urn of soup or tea service or simply to see how he is doing and tell him what a fine chap he is. Once a day, he writes down a bunch of gibberish--his purported results--and dispatches it over to the naval base.

He divides his time between thinking about sex and thinking about mathematics. The former keeps intruding upon the latter. It gets worse when the stout fiftyish cook named Blanche, who has been bringing him his meals, comes down with dropsy or ague or gout or colic or some other Shakespearian ailment and is replaced by Margaret, who is about twenty and quite fetching.

Margaret really messes up his head. When it gets really intolerable, he goes to the latrine (so that the staff will not break in on him at an inopportune moment) and executes a Manual Override. But one thing he learned in Hawaii was that a Manual Override is unfortunately not the same as the real thing. The effect wears off too soon.

While he's waiting for it to wear off, he gets a lot of solid math done. Alan provided him with some notes on redundancy and entropy, relating to the voice encryption work he is currently doing in New York City. Waterhouse works through that stuff and comes up with some nice lemmas which he lamentably cannot send to Alan without violating both common sense and any number of security procedures. This done, he turns his attention to cryptology, pure and raw. He spent enough time at Bletchley Park to realize just how little of this art he really understood.

The U-boats talk on the radio way too much and everyone in the German Navy knows it. Their security experts have been nagging their brass to tighten up their security, and they finally did it by introducing the four-rotor version of the Enigma machine, which has knocked Bletchley Park on its ass for about a year...

Margaret has to walk round the castle out of doors to bring Waterhouse his meals, and by the time she gets here, her cheeks have turned rosy red. The steam coming from her mouth floats around her face like a silken veil--

Stop that, Lawrence! The subject of today's lecture is the German Naval four-wheel Enigma, known to them as Triton and to the Allies as Shark. Introduced on 2 February of last year (1942), it wasn't until the recovery of the beached German U-boat U-559 on 30 October that Bletchley Park got the material they needed to break the code. A couple of weeks ago, on 13 December, Bletchley Park finally busted Shark, and the internal communications of the German Navy became an open book to the Allies once more.

The first thing they have learned, as a result, is that the Germans have broken our merchant shipping codes wide open, and that all year long they have known exactly where to find the convoys.