Cryptonomicon

"That is right. And in the case of Trickster gods the pattern is that cunning people tend to attain power that un-cunning people don't. And all cultures are fascinated by this. Some of them, like many Native Americans, basically admire it, but never couple it with technological development. Others, like the Norse, hate it and identify it with the Devil."

"Hence the strange love-hate relationship that Americans have with hackers."

"That's right."

"Hackers are always complaining that journalists cast them as bad guys. But you think that this ambivalence is deeper-seated."

"In somecultures. The Vikings--to judge from their mythology--would instinctively hate hackers. But something different happened with the Greeks. The Greeks liked their geeks. That's how we get Athena."

"I'll buy that--but where does the war-goddess thing come in?"

"Let's face it, Randy, we've all known guys like Ares. The pattern of human behavior that caused the internal mental representation known as Ares to appear in the minds of the ancient Greeks is very much with us today, in the form of terrorists, serial killers, riots, pogroms, and aggressive tinhorn dictators who turn out to be military incompetents. And yet for all their stupidity and incompetence, people like that can conquer and control large chunks of the world if they are not resisted."

"You must meet my friend Avi."

"Who is going to fight them off, Randy?"

"I'm afraid you're going to say weare."

"Sometimes it might be other Ares-worshippers, as when Iran and Iraq went to war and no one cared who won. But if Ares-worshippers aren't going to end up running the whole world, someone needs to do violence to them. This isn't very nice, but it's a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence. Cunning. Metis."

"Tactical cunning, like Odysseus and the Trojan Horse, or--"

"Both that, and technological cunning. From time to time there is a battle that is out-and-out won by a new technology--like longbows at Crecy. For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries--you have the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But something happens around, say, the time that the Monitor,which the Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens to run into the Merrimack,of which the Southerners believe exactly the same thing, and they pound the hell out of each other for hours and hours. That's as good a point as any to identify as the moment when a spectacular rise in military technology takes off--it's the elbow in the exponential curve. Now it takes the world's essentially conservative military establishments a few decades to really comprehend what has happened, but by the time we're in the thick of the Second World War, it's accepted by everyone who doesn't have his head completely up his ass that the war's going to be won by whichever side has the best technology. So on the German side alone we've got rockets, jet aircraft, nerve gas, wire-guided missiles. And on the Allied side we've got three vast efforts that put basically every top-level hacker, nerd, and geek to work: the codebreaking thing, which as you know gave rise to the digital computer; the Manhattan Project, which gave us nuclear weapons; and the Radiation Lab, which gave us the modern electronics industry. Do you know why we won the Second World War, Randy?"

"I think you just told me."

"Because we built better stuff than the Germans?"

"Isn't that what you said?"

"But why did we build better stuff, Randy?"

"I guess I'm not competent to answer, Enoch, I haven't studied that period well enough."

"Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena."

"And am I supposed to gather that you, or your organization, had something to do with all that?"

"Oh, come now, Randy! Let's not allow this to degenerate into conspiracy theories."

"Sorry. I'm tired."

"So am I. Goodnight."

And then Enoch goes to sleep. Just like that. Randy doesn't.

To the Cryptonomicon!

***

Randy is mounting a known-ciphertext attack: the hardest kind. He has the ciphertext (the Arethusa intercepts) and nothing else. He doesn't even know the algorithm that was used to encrypt them. In modern cryptanalysis, this is unusual; normally the algorithms are public knowledge. That is because algorithms that have been openly discussed and attacked within the academic community tend to be much stronger than ones that have been kept secret. People who rely on keeping their algorithms secret are ruined as soon as that secret gets out. But Arethusa dates from World War II, when people were much less canny about such things.

This would be a hell of a lot easier if Randy knew some of the plaintext that is encrypted within these messages. Of course, if he knew all of the plaintext, he wouldn't even need to decrypt them; breaking Arethusa in that case would be an academic exercise.