Cryptonomicon

Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.Bobby Shaftoe has learned most of his practical knowledge--how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip--from the latter type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can even see the desperation spread over such a man's face as he listens to himself speak.

Men of the other type--the ones who use speech as a tool of their work, who are confident and fluent--aren't necessarily more intelligent, or even more educated. It took Shaftoe a long time to figure that out.

Anyway, everything was neat and tidy in Bobby Shaftoe's mind until he met two of the men in Detachment 2702: Enoch Root and Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. He can't put his finger on what bugs him about those two. During the weeks they spent together on Qwghlm, he spent a lot of time listening to them yammer at each other, and began to suspect that there might be a third category of man, a kind so rare that Shaftoe never met any of them until now.

Officers are discouraged from fraternizing with enlisted men and non-coms, which has made it more difficult for Shaftoe to pursue his research into the matter. Sometimes, though, circumstances jumble all of the ranks together willy-nilly. A prime example would be this Trinidadian tramp steamer.

Where do they get this stuff?wonders Shaftoe. Does the U.S. government keep a bunch of Trinidadian tramp steamers riding at anchor at a naval yard somewhere, just in case one is needed?

He thinks not. This one shows signs of a very recent and hasty change of ownership. It is a mother lode of yellowed, ragged, multiethnic pornography, some of it very run-of-the-mill and some so exotic that he mistook it for medical literature at first. There is a lot of stray paperwork on the bridge and in certain cabins, most of which Shaftoe only sees out of the corner of his eye as these areas tend to be the domain of officers. The heads are still littered with their predecessors' curly black pubic hairs, and the storage lockers are sparsely stocked with exotic Caribbean foodstuffs, much of them rapidly going bad. The cargo hold is filled with bales and bales of coarse brown fibrous material--raw material for life preservers or bran muffins, he supposes.

None of them much cares, because Detachment 2702 has been freezing its ass off in the Far North ever since they left Italy a few months ago, and now they are running around shirtless, of all things. One little airplane ride, that's all it took, and they were in the balmy Azores. They did not get any R and R there--they went straight from the airfield to the Trinidadian ship, in the dead of night, huddled under tarps in a covered truck. But even the warm air that streamed in underneath the tarp felt like an exotic massage in a tropical whorehouse. And once they steamed out of sight of port, they were allowed to come up abovedecks and take in some sun.

This gives Bobby Shaftoe the opportunity to strike up a few conversations with Enoch Root, partly just for the hell of it and partly so that he can try to figure out this whole business about the third category of men. Progress comes slowly.

"I don't like the word 'addict' because it has terrible connotations," Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. "Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as 'Morphiumsüchtig.'The verb suchenmeans to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as 'morphine seeky' or even more loosely as 'morphine seeking.' I prefer 'seeky' because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Shaftoe says.

"Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It's leaky all the time--even if it's not raining at the moment. But it's only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to 'addict,' because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe."

"So what's the point?" Shaftoe asks. He asks this because he is expecting Root to give him an order, which is usually what men of the talkative sort end up doing after jabbering on for a while. But no order seems to be forthcoming, because that's not Root's agenda. Root just felt like talking about words. The SAS blokes refer to this kind of activity as wanking.