Cryptonomicon

Glumly, almost despairingly, the commanding officer and his subordinates get the musicians squared away. Even if they don't have enough desks to go around, each man can at least have a chair at a table or counter. Some ingenuity is displayed in finding places for all the new arrivals. It is clear that these people are trying their best at what they consider to be a hopeless task.

Then there is some talk about secrecy. A great dealof talk about it. They run through drills intended to test their ability to throw things awayproperly. This goes on for a longtime and the longer it continues, without an explanation as to why, the more mysterious it becomes. The musicians, who were at first a little put out by their chilly reception, start to speculate amongst themselves as to what kind of an operation they have gotten themselves into now.

Finally, one morning, the musicians are assembled in a classroom in front of the cleanest chalkboard Waterhouse has ever seen. The last few days have imbued him with just enough paranoia that he suspects it is that clean for a reason--erasing chalkboards is not to be taken lightly during wartime.

They are seated in little chairs with desks attached to them, desks designed for right-handers. Lawrence puts his notepad in his lap, then rests his bandaged right hand on the desk and begins to play a ditty from Art of Fugue,grimacing and even grunting with pain as his burned skin stretches and slides over his knuckles.

Someone chucks him on the shoulder. He opens his eyes to see that he is the only person in the room sitting down; an officer is on the deck. He stands up and his weak leg nearly buckles. When he finally gets himself fully to his feet, he sees that the officer (if he even isan officer) is out of uniform. Wayout of uniform. He's wearing a bathrobe and smoking a pipe. The bathrobe is extraordinarily worn, and not in the sense of, say, a hospital or hotel bathrobe that gets laundered frequently. This thing hasn't been laundered in a long time, but boy has it seen some use.The elbowsare worn out and the bottom of the right sleeve is ashy grey and slippery with graphite from being dragged back and forth, tens of thousands of times, across sheets of paper dense with number-two pencil work. The terrycloth has a dandruffy appearance, but it has nothing to do with exfoliation of the scalp; these flakes are way too big, and too geometric: rectangles and circular dots of oaktag, punched out of cards and tape respectively. The pipe went out a long time ago and the officer (or whatever he is) is not even pretending to worry about getting it relit. It is there just to give him something to bite down on, which he does as vigorously as a civil war infantryman having a leg sawed off.

Some other fellow--one who actually bothered to shave, shower, and put on a uniform--introduces bathrobe man as Commander Shane spelled-s-c-h-o-e-n, but Schoen is having none of it; he turns his back on them, exposing the back side of his bathrobe, which around the buttocks is worn transparent as a negligee. Reading from a notebook, he writes out the following in block letters:

19 17 17 19 14 20 23 18 19 8 12 16 19 8 3

21 8 25 18 14 18 6 31 8 8 15 18 22 18 11

Around the time that the fourth or fifth number is going up on the chalkboard, Waterhouse feels the hairs standing up on the back of his neck. By the time the third group of five numbers is written out, he has not failed to notice that none of them is larger than 26--that being the number of letters in the alphabet. His heart is pounding more wildly than it did when Nipponese bombs were tracing parabolic trajectories toward the deck of the grounded Nevada.He pulls a pencil out of his pocket. Finding no paper handy, he writes down the numbers from 1 to 26 on the surface of his little writing desk.

By the time the man in the bathrobe is done writing out the last group of numbers, Waterhouse is already well into his frequency count. He wraps it up as Bathrobe Man is saying something along the lines of "this might look like a meaningless sequence of numbers to you, but to a Nip naval officer it might look like something entirely different." Then the man laughs nervously, shakes his head sadly, squares his jaw resolutely, and runs through a litany of other emotion-laden expressions not a single one of which is appropriate here.

Waterhouse's frequency count is simply a tally of how frequently each number appears on the blackboard. It looks like this:

1

2

3 II

4

5

6 I

7

8 IIII

9

10

11 I

12 I

13

14 II

15 I

16 I

17 II

18 IIIIII

19 IIII

20 I

21 I

22 I

23 I

24

25 I

26