Cryptonomicon

"For god's sake, don't say it out loud! I'm filling out the trademark application as we speak," Avi said. Randy could hear a rattling sound in the background, computer keys impacting so rapidly it sounded like Avi was simply holding the keyboard between his pale, spindly hands and shaking it violently up and down. "But if the Filipinos do get their shit together, then we see explosive growth in telecoms, as in any other Arday."

"Arday?"

"R-D-A-E. Rapidly Developing Asian Economy. Either way, we win."

"I gather you want to do something with telecoms?"

"Bingo." In the background, a baby began to cough and cry. "Gotta go," Avi said, "Shlomo's asthma is spiking again. Take down this fingerprint."

"Fingerprint?"

"For my encryption key. For e-mail."

"Ordo?"

"Yeah."

Randy took out a ballpoint pen and, finding no paper in his pocket, poised it over the palm of his hand. "Shoot."

"67 81 A4 AE FF 40 25 9B 43 OE 29 8D 56 60 E3 2F." Then Avi hung up the phone.

Randy went back into the restaurant. On his way back, he asked the waiter to bring him a half-bottle of good red wine. Charlene heard him, and glowered. Randy was still thinking about innate ferocity, and did not see it in her face; only a schoolmarmishness common among all of her friends. My god! I have to get out of California, he realized.

Chapter 3 SEAWEED

Woman holds baby Eyes pale as a muzzle flash Band chimes frozen tears

The fourth marines is marching downhill to the strains of John Philip Sousa, which ought to be second nature to a Marine. But the Fourth Marines have been in Shanghai (which ain't no halls of Montezuma nor shores of Tripoli) for too long, longer than Marines should ever stay in one place, and Bobby's already seen his sergeant, one Frick, throw up from opium withdrawal.

A Marine band is several Shanghai blocks ahead. Bobby's platoon can hear the thumpity-thump of the big drums and the piercing noises from piccolos and glockenspiels but he can't follow the tune. Corporal Shaftoe is effectively their leader, because Sergeant Frick is useless.

Shaftoe marches alongside the formation, supposedly to keep an eye on his men, but mostly he's just staring at Shanghai.

Shanghai stares back, and mostly gives them a standing ovation. Of course there is a type of young street rowdy who makes it a point of honor to let the Marines know he isn't scared of them, and they are jeering the Marines from a safe distance, and setting off strings of fire crackers, which does nothing to steady anyone's nerves. The Europeans are applauding--a whole chorus line of Russian dancing girls from Delmonte's is showing thigh and blowing kisses. But most of the Chinese look pretty stonefaced, which--Bobby suspects--means they're scared shitless.

The worst thing is the women carrying half-white babies. A few of these women are rabid, hysterical, throwing themselves into formations of massed Marines, undeterred by rifle butts. But most of them are stoic: they stand with their light-eyed babies and glare, searching the ranks and files for the guilty party. They've all heard about what happened upriver in Nanjing when the Nips came there, and they know that when it's all over, the only trace that they and their babies ever existed may be a really bad memory in the mind of some American Marine.

It works for Shaftoe: he has hunted deer in Wisconsin and seen them limping across the snow, bleeding to death. He saw a man die in basic training at Parris Island. He has seen whole tangles of bodies in the Yangtze, downstream of where the Nipponese were prosecuting the China Incident, and he has seen refugees from places like Nanjing starve to death in the gutters of Shanghai. He has himself killed people who were trying to storm the riverboats it was his duty to protect. He thinks that he has never seen, and will never see, anything as terrible as those stone-faced Chinese women holding their white babies, not even blinking as the firecrackers explode all around them.

Until, that is, he looks into the faces of certain Marines who stare into that crowd and see their own faces looking back at them, pudgy with baby fat and streaked with tears. Some of them seem to think it's all a joke. But many of the Marines who march out of their empty barracks that morning sane and solid men, have, by the time they reach the gunboats waiting for them at the Bund, gone mad. They don't show it. But Shaftoe can see in their eyes that something has given way inside.