Cryptonomicon

Light dawns on the face of everyone except Avi himself, who maintains his almost perpetual mask of cool control. "So it's bad news, good news, bad news. Bad news number one: Anne's phone call. Good news: because of what has happened here in the last two days, Epiphyte Corp. is suddenly so desirable that Kepler is ready to play hardball to get his hands on some of our stock."

"What's the second bit of bad news?" Randy asks.

"It's very simple." Avi turns away from them for a moment, strolls away for a couple of paces until he is blocked by a stone bench, then turns to face them again. "This morning I told you that Epiphyte was worth enough, now, that we could buy people out at a reasonable rate. You probably interpreted that as a good thing. In a way, it was. But a small and valuable company in the business world is like a bright and beautiful bird sitting on a branch in a jungle, singing a happy song that can be heard from a mile away. It attracts pythons." Avi pauses for a moment. "Usually, the grace period is longer. You get valuable, but then you have some time--weeks or months--to establish a defensive position, before the python manages to slither up the trunk. This time, we happened to get valuable while we were perched virtually on top of the python. Now we're not valuable any more."

"What do you mean?" Eb says. "We're just as valuable as we were this morning."

"A small company that's being sued for a ton of money by the Dentist is most certainly notvaluable. It probably has an enormous negativevalue. The only way to give it positive value again is to make the lawsuit go away. See, Kepler holds all the cards. After Tom's incredible performance yesterday, all of the other guys in that conference room probably wanted a piece of us just as badly as Kepler did. But Kepler had one advantage: he was already in business with us. Which gave him a pretext for filing the lawsuit.

"So I hope you enjoyed our morning in the sun, even though we spent it in a cave," Avi concludes. He looks at Randy, and lowers his voice regretfully. "And if any of you were thinking of cashing out, let this be a lesson to you: be like the Dentist. Make up your mind and act fast."

Chapter 45 FUNKSPIEL

Colonel Chattan's aide shakes him awake. The first thing Waterhouse notices is that the guy is breathing fast and steady, the way Alan does when he comes in from a cross-country run.

"Colonel Chattan requests your presence in the Mansion most urgently." Waterhouse's billet is in the vast, makeshift camp five minutes' walk from Bletchley Park's Mansion. Striding briskly whilst buttoning up his shirt, he covers the distance in four. Then, twenty feet from the goal, he is nearly run over by a pack of Rolls-Royces, gliding through the night as dark and silent as U-boats. One comes so close that he can feel the heat of its engine; its muggy exhaust blows through his trouser leg and condenses on his skin.

The old farts from the Broadway Buildings climb out of those Rolls Royces and precede Waterhouse into the Mansion. In the library, the men cluster obsequiously round a telephone, which rings frequently and, when picked up, makes distant, tinny, shouting noises that can be heard, but not understood, from across the room. Waterhouse estimates that the Rolls-Royces must have driven up from London at an average speed of about nine thousand miles per hour.

Long tables are being looted from other rooms and chivvied into the library by glossy-haired young men in uniform, knocking flecks of paint off the doorframes. Waterhouse takes an arbitrary chair at an arbitrary table. Another aide wheels in a cart of wire baskets piled with file folders, still smoking from the friction of being jerked out of Bletchley Park's infinite archives. If this were a proper meeting, mimeographs might have been made up ahead of time and individually served. But this is sheer panic, and Waterhouse knows instinctively that he'd better take advantage of his early arrival if he wants to know anything. So he goes over to the cart and grabs the folder on the bottom of the stack, guessing that they'd have pulled the most important one first. It is labeled: U-691.

The first few pages are just a form: a U-boat data sheet consisting of many boxes. Half of them are empty. The other half have been filled in by different hands using different writing implements at different times, with many erasures and cross-outs and marginal notes written by bet-hedging analysts.

Then there is a log containing everything U-691 is ever known to have done, in chronological order. The first entry is its launch, at Wilhelmshaven on September 19, 1940, followed by a long list of the ships it has murdered. There's one odd notation from a few months ago: