Cryptonomicon

"We ran those intercepts through Harvest backwards and forwards. The lights dimmed in Washington and Baltimore, we used to say, when we were doing Arethusa work. I still have the opening groups memorized: AADAA FGTAA and so on. Those double As! People wrote dissertations about their significance. We concluded in the end that they were just flukes. We invented entire new systems of cryptanalysis to attack it--wrote new volumes of the Cryptonomicon.The data were very nearly random. Finding patterns in them was like trying to read a book that had been burned, and its ashes mixed with all the cement that went into the Hoover Dam. We never got anything that was worth a damn.

"After ten years or so, we began using it to haze incoming recruits. By that time the NSA was getting fantastically huge, we were hiring all of the most brilliant math prodigies in the United States, and when we got one who was especially cocky we'd put him on the Arethusa project just to give him the message that he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. We broke a lot of kids on that wheel. But then, around 1959, this one kid came in--the smartest kid we had seen yet--and he broke it."

"Well, I assume you didn't place this phone call just to keep me in suspense," Randy says. "What did he find?"

"He found that the Arethusa intercepts did not represent coded messages at all. They were simply the output of a particular mathematical function, a Riemann zeta function, which has many uses--one being that it is used in some cryptosystems as a random number generator. He proved that if you set up this function in a particular way, and then gave it, as input, a particular string of numbers, it would crank out the exact sequence that was on those intercepts. So that was all she wrote. And it almost ended Comstock's career."

"Why?"

"Partly because of the insane amount of money and manpower he had thrown into the Arethusa project. But mostly because the input string--the seed for the random number generator--was the boss's name.

C-O-M-S-T-O-C-K."

"You're kidding."

"We had the proof right there. It was impeccable from a pure math standpoint. So, either Comstock had generated the Arethusa intercepts himself, and been stupid enough to use his own name as the seed--and believe me, he really was that kind of guy--or else someone had played an enormous practical joke on him."

"Which do you think it was?"

"Well, he never divulged where he had gotten these intercepts in the first place and so it was difficult to form a hypothesis. I am inclined toward the joke theory, because he was the sort of man who gives his subordinates a powerful urge to play practical jokes on him. But in the end it didn't matter. He was drummed out of the NSA at the age of forty-six. A classic grey man, a war veteran, a technocrat with a high security clearance and any number of high-powered connections. He went more or less straight to Kennedy's National Security Counsel from there, and the rest is history."

"Wow!" Randy says, kind of awed. "What a jerk!"

"No kidding," says Pontifex. "And now, his son--well, don't get me started on his son."

As Pontifex's voice trails off, Randy asks, "So, you are calling me now for what purpose?"

Pontifex doesn't answer for a few moments, as if he's wrestling with the question himself. But Randy doubts that's the case. Someone is trying to send you a message."I suppose that I am just appalled by the very idea of more young bright men throwing themselves against Arethusa. Until I received that call from a boat on Lake Washington, I had thought it was dead and buried."

"But why should you care?"

"You've already been cheated out of a fortune in computer patents," Pontifex says. "It wouldn't be fair."

"So, it's pity, then."

"Furthermore--as I said--it is my friend's job to keep you under surveillance. He's going to hear almost every word you say for the next few months, or at least read transcripts. For you and Cantrell and those others to spend that entire time yammering about Arethusa would be more than he could bear. Hideous deja vu. Just intolerably Kafkaesque. So please, just let it go."

"Well, thanks for the tip."

"You're welcome, Randy. And may I give you a word of advice?"

"That's what Pontifex is supposed to do."

"First a disclaimer: I've been out of circulation for a while. Have not picked up the postmodern unwillingness to make value judgments."

"Okay, I am bracing myself."

"My advice: do try to build the best Crypt you possibly can. Your clients--some of them, anyway--are, for all practical purposes, aborigines. They will either make you rich or kill you, like something straight out of a Joseph Campbell footnote."

"So you're talking about your basic Colombian drug lord types, here?"

"Yes, I am, but I'm also referring to certain white men in suits. It only takes a single generation to revert to savagery."