Cryptonomicon

Outside his window, the long slender isle of Palawan lies parallel to their flight path. A fogbound pilot could almost get from Kinakuta to Manila by following Palawan's beaches, but that is a moot point on a day like this. Those beaches slope gradually into the transparent waters of the South China Sea. When you're down there planted in the sand, looking at a glancing angle across the waves, it probably doesn't look like much, but from up here you can see straight down through the water for many fathoms, and so all of the islands, and even the coral heads, have skirts that start out dark brown or dun near the water and blend into yellow and finally into swimming-pool blue before eventually fading into the deep blue of the ocean. Every little coral head and sandbar looks like the iridescent eye on a peacock's plume.

After the conversation at Tom Howard's last night, Randy slept in his guest room and then spent most of the day in Kinakuta buying a new laptop, complete with a new hard drive, and transferring all of the data from the drive he salvaged in Los Altos onto the new one, encrypting everything in the process. Considering all of the completely boring and useless corporate documents he has subjected to state-of-the-art encryption, he can't believe he carried the Arethusa stuff around on his hard drive, unencrypted, for several days, and across a couple of national borders. Not to mention the original ETC punch-cards, which now reside in Tom Howard's basement safe. Of course that stuff is encrypted to begin with, but that was done in 1945, and so by modern standards it might as well have been enciphered with a cereal-box decoder ring. Or at least that is what Randy is kind of hoping. Another thing he did this morning was to download the current version of the Cryptonomiconfrom the ftp server where it lives in San Francisco. Randy's never looked at it in detail, but he has heard it contains samples of code, or at least algorithms, that he could use to attack Arethusa. With luck, the very latest public code-breaking techniques in the Cryptonomiconmight match up to the classified technology that Pontifex and his colleagues were employing at the NSA thirty years ago. Those techniques didn't work against the Arethusa messages that they were trying to decrypt, but this was probably only because those messages were random numbers--not the real messages. Now that Randy has what he suspects are the real messages, he may be able to accomplish what Earl Comstock tried and failed to do during the fifties.

They are angling across the terminator--not the robotic assassin of moviedom, but the line between night and day through which our planet incessantly rotates. Looking east, Randy can see over the rim of the world to places where it is dusk, and the clouds catch only the reddest fraction of the sun's light, squatting in darkness but glowing with sullen contained fire like coals in their feathery ruffs of ash. The airplane is still in the daylight, and is assiduously tracked by mysterious bars of rainbow, little spectral doppelgangers--probably some new NSA surveillance technology. Some of the Palawan's rivers run blue and straight into the ocean and some carry enormous plumes of eroded silt that feather out into the ocean and are swept up the shore by currents. In Kinakuta there is less deforestation than there is here, but only because they have oil instead. All of these countries are burning resources at a fantastic rate to get their economies stoked up, gambling that they'll be able to make the jump into hyperspace--some kind of knowledge economy, presumably--before they run out of stuff to sell and turn into Haiti.

Randy is paging his way through the opening sections of the Cryptonomicon,but he can never concentrate when he's on an airplane. The opening sections are stolen pages from World War II-era military manuals. These used to be classified until ten years ago, when one of Cantrell's friends found copies just sitting in a library in Kentucky and drove there with a shitload of dimes and photocopied them. That got public, civilian cryptanalysis up to where the government was in the l940s. The Xeroxes have been scanned and OCRed and converted to the HTML format used for Web pages so that people can put in links and marginal notes and annotations and corrections without messing with the original text, and this they have done enthusiastically, which is all very well but makes it hard to read. The original text is set in a deliberately crabbed, old-fashioned typeface to make it instantly distinguishable from the cyber-era annotations. The introduction to the Cryptonomiconwas written, probably before Pearl Harbor, by a guy named William Friedman, and is filled with aphorisms probably intended to keep neophyte code-breakers from slapping grenades to their heads after a long week of wrestling with the latest Nipponese machine ciphers.