Cryptonomicon

They end up in a relatively cozy glass-walled room with a view across the churned mud to the lake. Chester fires up an espresso machine that looks like a scale model of an oil refinery and generates a brace of lattes. This room happens to be underneath the TWA's left wing tip, which is relatively intact. Randy realizes, now, that the entire plane has been hung in a gentle banking attitude, like it's making an imperceptible course change, which is not really appropriate; a vertical dive would make more sense, but then the house would have to be fifty stories high to accommodate it. He can see a repeating pattern of tears in the wing's skin that seems to be an expression of the same underlying math that generates repeating vortices in a wake, or swirls in a Mandelbrot set. Charlene and his friends used to heckle him for being a Platonist, but everywhere he goes he sees the same few ideal forms shadowed in the physical world. Maybe he's just stupid or something.

The house lacks a woman's touch. Randy gathers, from hints dropped by Chester, that the TWA has not turned out to be the conversation starter that he had hoped it would be. He is considering building fake ceilings over some of the house's partitions so that they will feel more like rooms, which, he admits, might make "some people" feel more comfortable there and open the possibility of their committing themselves to "an extended stay." So evidently he is in early negotiations with some kind of female, which is good news.

"Chester, two years ago you sent me e-mail about a project you were launching to build replicas of early computers. You wanted information about my grandfather's work."

"Yeah," Chester says. "You want to see that stuff? It's been on the back burner, but--"

"I just inherited some of his notebooks," Randy says.

Chester's eyebrows go up. Amy glances out the window; her hair, skin, and clothes take on a pronounced reddish tinge from Doppler effect as she drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity.

"I want to know if you have a functioning ETC card reader."

Chester snorts. "That's all?"

"That's all."

"You want a 1932 Mark III card reader? Or a 1938 Mark IV? Or a--"

"Does it make any difference? They all read the same cards, right?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

"I have some cards from circa 1945 that I would like to have read out onto a floppy disk that I can take home."

Chester picks up a cellphone the size of a gherkin and begins to prod it. "I'll call my card man," he says. "Retired ETC engineer. Lives on Mercer Island. Comes up here on his boat a couple times a week and tinkers with this stuff. He'll be really excited to meet you."

While Chester is conversing with his card man, Amy meets Randy's eyes and gives him a look that is almost perfectly unreadable. She seems a bit deflated. Worn down. Ready to go home. Her very unwillingness to show her feelings confirms this. Before this trip, Amy would have agreed that it takes all kinds to make a world. She'd still assent to it now. But Randy's been showing her some practical applications of that concept, in the last few days, that are going to take her a while to fit into her world-view. Or, more importantly, into her Randy-view. And sure enough, the moment Chester's off the phone, she's asking if she can use it to call the airlines. There is only a momentary upward flick of the eyes towards the TWA. And once Chester gets over his astonishment that anyone still uses voice technology to make airline reservations in this day and age, he takes her to the nearest computer (there is a fully outfitted UNIX machine in every room) and patches into the airline databases directly and begins searching for the optimal route back home. Randy goes and stares out the window at the chilly whitecaps slapping the mud shore and fights the urge to just stay here in Seattle, which is a town where he could be very happy. Behind him Chester and Amy keep saying "Manila," and it sounds ridiculously exotic and hard to reach. Randy thinks that he is marginally smarter than Chester and would be even richer if he'd only stayed here.

A fast white boat comes larruping around the point from the direction of Mercer Island and banks towards him. Randy sets down his cold coffee and goes out to his car and retrieves a certain trunk--a lovely gift from a delighted Aunt Nina. It is full of certain old treasures, like his grandfather's high school physics notebooks. He sets aside (for example) a box labeled HARVARD-WATERHOUSE PRIME FACTOR CHALLENGE '49-52 to reveal a stack of bricks, neatly wrapped in paper that has gone gold with age, each consisting of a short stack of ETC cards, and each labeled ARETHUSA INTERCEPTS with a date from 1944 or '45. They have been in suspended animation for more than fifty years, stored on a dead medium, and now Randy is going to breathe life into them again, and maybe send them out on the Net, a few strands of fossil DNA broken out of their amber shells and released in the world again.