Cryptonomicon

The benzedrine wears off five hours later and Comstock finds himself sprawled across a table in a room filled with haggard, exhausted men. Waterhouse and the privates are pasty with chalk dust, giving them a ghoulish appearance. The stenographers are surrounded with used pads, and frequently stop writing to flap their limp hands in the air like white flags. The wire recorders are spinning uselessly, one reel full and one empty. Only the photographer is still going strong, hitting that strobe every time Waterhouse manages to fill the chalkboard.

Everything smells like underarm sweat. Comstock realizes that Waterhouse is looking at him expectantly. "See?" Waterhouse asks.

Comstock sits up and glances furtively at his own legal pad, where he hoped to draw up an agenda. He sees Waterhouse's four assertions, which he copied down during the first five minutes of the meeting, and then nothing except a tangled field of spiky doodles surrounding the words BURY and DISINTER.

It behooves Comstock to say something."This thing, the, uh, the burying procedure, that's the, uh--"

"The key feature!" Waterhouse says brightly. "See, these ETC card machines are great for input and output. We've got that covered. The logic elements are straightforward enough. What was needed was a way to give the machine memory, so that it could, to use Turing's terminology, bury data quickly, and just as quickly disinter it. So I made one of those. It is an electrical device, but its underlying principles would be familiar to any organ maker."

"Could I, uh, see it?" Comstock asks.

"Sure! It's down in my lab."

Going to see it is more complicated. First everyone has to use the toilet, then the cameras and strobes have to be moved down to the lab and set up. When they've all filed in, Waterhouse is standing next to a giant rack of pipes with thousands of wires hanging out of it.

"That's it?" Comstock says, when the group is finally assembled. Pea-sized drops of mercury are scattered around the floor like ball bearings. The flat soles of Comstock's shoes explode them into bursts rolling in all directions.

"That's it."

"What did you call it again?"

"The RAM," Waterhouse says. "Random Access Memory. I was going to put a picture of a ram on it. Y'know, one of those sheeps with the big huge curly horns?"

"Yes."

"But I didn't have time, and I'm not that good at drawing pictures." Each pipe is four inches in diameter and thirty-two feet long. There must be a hundred of them, at least--Comstock is trying to remember that requisition that he signed, months ago--Waterhouse had ordered enough drain pipe to plumb a whole goddamn military base.

The pipes are laid out horizontally, like a rank of organ pipes that has been knocked flat. Stuck into one end of each pipe is a little paper speaker ripped from an old radio.

"The speaker plays a signal--a note--that resonates in the pipe, and creates a standing wave," Waterhouse says. "That means that in some parts of the pipe, the air pressure is low, and in other parts it is high." He is backing down the length of one of the pipes, making chopping motions with his hand. "These U-tubes are full of mercury." He points to one of several U-shaped glass tubes that are plumbed into the bottom of the long pipe.

"I can see that very plainly, Waterhouse," Comstock says. "Could you keep backing up to the next one?" he requests, peering over the photographers' shoulder through the viewfinder. "You're blocking my view--that's better--farther--farther--" because he can still see Waterhouse's shadow. "That's good. Hit it!"

The photographer pulls the trigger, the strobe flares.

"If the air pressure in the organ pipe is high, it pushes the mercury down a little bit. If it's low, it sucks the mercury up. I put an electrical contact into each U-tube--just a couple of wires separated by an air gap. If those wires are high and dry (like because high air pressure in the organ pipe is shoving the mercury down away from them), no current flows. But if they are immersed in the mercury (because low air pressure in the organ pipe is sucking the mercury up to cover them), then current flows between them, because mercury conducts electricity! So the U-tubes produce a set of binary digits that is like a picture of the standing wave--a graph of the harmonics that make up the musical note that is being played on the speaker. We feed that vector back to the oscillator circuit that is driving the speaker, so that the vector of bits keeps refreshing itself forever, unless the machine decides to write a new pattern of bits into it."

"Oh, so the ETC machinery actually can control this thing?" Comstock asks.