Cryptonomicon

The dance is being organized by an Australian volunteer organization--he doesn't know or care about the details. Mrs. McTeague evidently feels that the rent she collects from her boarders obligates her to find them wives as well as feeding and housing them, so she badgers all of them to go, and to bring dates if possible. Rod finally shuts her up by announcing that he will be attending with a large group, to include his country cousin Mary. Rod is about eight feet tall, and so it will be easy to pick him out across a crowded dance floor. With any luck, then, the diminutive Mary will be in his vicinity.

So Waterhouse goes to the dance, ransacking his mind for opening lines that he can use with Mary. He comes up with several possibilities:

"Do you realize that Nipponese industry is only capable of producing forty bulldozers per year?" To be followed up with: "No wonder they use slave labor to build their revetments!"

Or, "Because of antenna configuration limitations inherent in their design, Nipponese naval radar systems have a blind spot to the rear--you always want to come in from dead astern."

Or, "The Nip Army's minor, low-level codes are actually harder to break than the important high-level ones! Isn't that ironic?"

Or, "So, you're from the outback ... do you can a lot of your own food? It might interest you to know that a close relative of the bacterium that makes canned soup go bad is responsible for gas gangrene."

Or, "Nip battleships have started to blow up spontaneously, because the high-explosive shells in their magazines become chemically unstable over time."

Or, "Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations."

And much more in this vein. So far he has not hit on anything that is absolutely guaranteed to sweep her off her feet. He doesn't, in fact, have the first idea what the fuck he's going to do. Which is how it's always been with Waterhouse and women, which is why he has never really had a girlfriend before.

But this is different. This is desperation.

What is there to say about the dance? Big room. Men in uniforms, mostly looking smarter than they have a right to. Mostly looking smarter, in fact, than Waterhouse. Women in dresses and hairdos. Lipstick, pearls, a big band, white gloves, fist fights, a little bit o' kissin' and a wee bit o' vomitin'. Waterhouse gets there late--that transportation thing again. All the gasoline is being used to hurl enormous bombers through the atmosphere so that high explosives can be showered on Nips. Moving the wad of flesh called Waterhouse across Brisbane so he can try to deflower a maiden is way down the priority list. He has to do a lot of walking in his stiff, shiny leather shoes, which become less shiny. By the time he gets there, he is pretty sure that they are functioning only as tourniquets preventing uncontrollable arterial bleeding from the wounds they've induced.

Rather late into the dance he finally picks out Rod on the dance floor and stalks him, over the course of several numbers (Rod having no shortage of dance partners), to a corner of the room where everyone seems to know each other, and all of them seem to be having a perfectly fine time without the intervention of a Waterhouse.

But finally he identifies Mary Smith's neck, which looks just as unspeakably erotic seen from behind through thirty yards of dense cigarette smoke as it did seen from the side in Mrs. McTeague's parlor. She is wearing a dress, and a string of pearls that adorn the neck's architecture quite nicely. Waterhouse sets his direction of march towards her and plods onward, like a Marine covering the last few yards to a Nip pillbox where he knows full well he's going to die. Can you get a posthumous decoration for being shot down in flames at a dance?

He's just a few paces away, still forging along woozily towards that white column of neck, when suddenly the tune comes to an end, and he can hear Mary's voice, and the voices of her friends. They are chattering away happily. But they are not speaking English.

Finally, Waterhouse places that accent. Not only that: he solves another mystery, having to do with some incoming mail he has seen at Mrs. McTeague's house, addressed to someone named cCmndhd.

It's like this: Rod and Mary are Qwghlmian! And their family name is not Smith--it just sounds vaguely like Smith. It's really cCmndhd. Rod grew up in Manchester--in some Qwghlmian ghetto, no doubt--and Mary's from a branch of the family that got into trouble (probably sedition) a couple of generations back and got Transported to the Great Sandy Desert.