Cryptonomicon

A: Obviously the people who control the gold want to be paid for it. Paying them in more gold, or in precious gems, would be ludicrous. They do not have bank accounts. They have to be paid in Philippine pesos. Anything bigger than about a 500-peso note is useless in this area. A 500-peso note is worth about $20, and so it would be necessary to bring six million of them into the jungle to perform the transaction. Based on some rudimentary calculations I have made here using a mechanic's caliper and the contents of my wallet, the stack of 500-peso notes would be about (please wait while I switch my calculator over to the "scientific notation" mode) 25,000 inches high. Or, if you prefer the metric system, something like two-thirds of a kilometer. If you stacked the bills a meter high, you would need six or seven hundred such stacks, which if jammed close together would cover an area about three meters on a side. Basically we are talking about a large Ryder box truck full of money. This would have to be transported into the middle of the jungle, and obviously, melting down cash and secreting it inside of a truck is not an option.

Q: Since the military seems to be the big obstacle here, why not simply cut a deal with them? Let them keep a big cut of the proceeds in exchange for not hassling us.

A: Because the money would go to the NPA which would use it to buy weapons for the purpose of killing people in the military.

Q: There must be some way to use the value of this gold to leverage some kind of extraction operation.

A: The gold is worthless to a bank until it has been assayed. Until then it is only a blurry Polaroid of a stack of yellow objects in what seems to be a jungle. In order to perform an assay you need to go into the jungle, find the gold, bore out a sample, and transport it safely back to a large city. But this proves nothing. Even if the potential backers believe that your assay really came from the jungle (i.e., that you did not switch samples along the way) all they know now is the purity of one end of one bar in the stack. Basically it is not possible to obtain full value for this gold until the entire stack has been extracted and taken to a vault where it can be systematically assayed.

Q: Could you maybe just get the gold to some local bank and then sell it at steep discount, so that the burden of transporting it would be on someone else's shoulders?

A: DMS relates the tale of one such transaction, in a provincial town in north Luzon, which was interrupted when local entrepreneurs literally blew one of the bank's walls off with dynamite, came in, and grabbed both the gold and the cash that was going to be used to pay for the gold. DMS asserts he would rather slit his own throat quietly than walk into a small-town bank with anything worth more than a few tens of thousands of dollars.

Q: Is the situation basically impossible then?

A: It is basically impossible.

Q: Then what was the point of the whole exercise?

A: To come full circle to the first thing DMS said. It was to send us a message.

Q: What is the message?

A: That money is not worth having if you can't spend it.

That certain people have a lot of money that they badly want to spend. And that if we can give them a way to spend it, through the Crypt, that these people will be very happy. and conversely that if we screw up they will be very sad, and that whether they are happy or sad they will be eager to share these emotions with us, the shareholders and management team of Epiphyte Corp.

And now I am going to e-mail this to all of you and then summon the flight attendant and demand the array of alcoholic beverages I so richly deserve. Cheers.

–-R

Randall Lawrence Waterhouse

Current meatspace coordinates, hot from the GPS receiver card in my laptop:

27 degrees, 14.95 minutes N latitude 143 degrees. 17.44 minutes E longitude

Nearest geographical feature: the Bonin Islands

Chapter 60 ROCKET

Julieta has retreated somewhere far up beyond the Arctic Circle. Shaftoe has been pursuing her like a dogged Mountie, slogging across the sexual tundra on frayed snowshoes and leaping heroically from floe to floe. But she remains about as distant, and about as reachable, as Polaris. She has spent more time lately with Enoch Root than with him--and Root's a celibate priest or something. Or is he?!

On the few occasions Bobby Shaftoe has actually gotten Julieta to crack a smile, she has immediately begun to ask difficult questions: Did you have sex with Glory, Bobby? Did you use a condom? Is it possible that she might have become pregnant? Can you absolutely rule out the possibility that you have a child in the Philippines? How old would he or she be right now? Let's see, you fucked her on Pearl Harbor Day, so the child would have been born in early September of '42. Your child would be fourteen, fifteen months old now--perhaps just learning to walk! How precious!