Cryptonomicon

and in a few seconds bang! he gets a login prompt. Randy now has another look at the animated window, and notes with approval that the info-bolts have been replaced with gouts of question marks. This means that his computer has recognized laundry.org as a S/WAN machine--running the Secure Wide Area Network protocol--which means that every packet going back and forth between Randy's laptop and laundry.org is encrypted. Definitely a good idea when you are about to do something illegal over the radio.

Mike or Mark gets out of his car, cutting a dramatic figure in a long black Western-style coat, a look rather spoiled by the t-shirt he's got on underneath it: black with a fat red question mark in the middle. He hitches the strap of his shotgun up onto his shoulder and leans into his back door to retrieve a large black cowboy hat, which he places on the roof of his car. He thrusts his elbows into the air and gathers his long hair back behind his ears, staring up at the sky, and then clamps the cowboy hat down on his head. Tied loosely around his neck is a black bandanna with a question-mark pattern, which he now pulls up over the bridge of his nose so that just an eye-slit shows between it and the cowboy hat. Randy would be really alarmed if it weren't for the fact that several of his friends, such as John Cantrell, often go around looking this way. Mike or Mark strides across the Park 'n' Lock, tracked carefully by a panning cameraman, and jogs across the street to the 24 Jam.

Randy logs onto laundry.org using ssh--"secure shell"--a way of further encrypting communications between two computers. Laundry.org is an anonymizing service; all packets routed through it to another computer are stripped of identifying information first, so that anyone down the line who intercepts one of those packets has no way of knowing where it originated. Once he's patched into the anonymizer, Randy types

telnet crypt.kk

and hits the return key and then actually, literally, prays. The Crypt is still going through its shakedown period (which, indeed, is the only reason that all of Tombstone's contents have not been moved onto it yet).

In the lot of the 24 Jam, Mike or Mark has joined three other elvishlooking sorts in black cowboy hats and bandannas, whom Randy can identify based on the length and color of their ponytails and beards. There's Stu, a Berkeley grad student who is somehow mixed up in Avi's HEAP project, and Phil, who invented a major programming language a couple of years ago and goes helicopter-skiing in his spare time, and Craig, who knows everything there is to know about encrypted credit-card transactions on the Net and is a devotee of traditional Nipponese archery. Some of these guys are wearing long coats and some aren't. There is a lot of Secret Admirers iconography: t-shirts bearing the number 56, which is a code for Yamamoto, or just pictures of Yamamoto himself, or big fat question marks. They are having an energetic and very happy conversation--though it looks a bit forced--because, to a man, they are carrying long weapons out in plain sight. One of them has a hunting rifle, and each of the others is slinging a rudimentary-looking gun with a banana clip sticking out of the side. Randy thinks, but is not sure, that these are HEAP guns.

This scene, not surprisingly, has caught the attention of the police, who have surrounded these four with squad cars, and who are standing at the ready with rifles and shotguns. It is an oddity of the law in many jurisdictions that, while carrying (say) a concealed one-shot .22 derringer requires a license, openly carrying (e.g.) a big game rifle is perfectly legal. Concealed weapons are outlawed or at least heavily regulated, and unconcealed ones are not. So a lot of Secret Admirers--who tend to be gun nuts--have taken to going around conspicuously armed as a way of pointing out the absurdity of those rules. Their point is this: who gives a shit about concealed weapons anyway, since they are only useful for defending oneself against assaults by petty criminals, which almost never happens? The real reason the Constitution provides for the right to bear arms is defending oneself against oppressive governments, and when it comes to that, your handgun is close to useless. So (according to these guys) if you are going to assert your right to keep and bear arms you should do it openly, by packing something really big.

A bunch of junk scrolls up Randy's screen. WELCOME TO THE CRYPT, it begins, and then there's a paragraph of information about what a great idea the Crypt is and how anyone who gives a damn about privacy should get an account here. Randy truncates the commercial message with the whack of a key, and logs in as Randy. Then he enters the command

telnet tombstone.epiphyte.com

and gets two gratifying messages in return: one saying that a connection has been established with Tombstone, and the next saying that a S/WAN link has been automatically negotiated. Finally he gets