Cryptonomicon

But the Japanese have to play by the same rules as everyone else. Oh, sure, you can get a kind of submission from a conquered people by scaring the shit out of them, but it doesn't work very well to hold a knife to someone's throat and say, "I want you to believe that this piece of paper is worth ten pounds sterling." They might say that they believe it, but they won't really believe it. They won't actas if they believe it. And if they don't actthat way, then there is no currency, workers don't get paid (you can enslave them, but you still have to pay the slavedrivers), the economy doesn't work, you can't extract the natural resources that prompted you to conquer the country in the first place. Basically, if you're going to run an economy you have to have a currency. When someone walks into a bank with one of your notes you have to be able to give them gold in exchange for it.

The Nipponese are maniacs for planning things out. Waterhouse knows this; he has been reading their decrypted messages twelve, eighteen hours a day for a couple of years now, he knows their minds. He knows, as surely as he knows how to play a D major scale, that the Nipponese must have given thought to this problem of backing their imperial currency--not just for Australia but New Zealand, New Guinea, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, Indochina, Korea, Manchuria.

How much gold and silver would you need in order to convince that many human beings that your paper currency was actually worth some thing? Where would you put it?

The escort takes him down a couple of levels and finally to a surprisingly large room, deep down. If they are in the bowels of the island, then this must be the vermiform appendix or something. It is glob shaped, walls smooth and ripply in most places, chisel-gnawed where men have seen fit to enlarge it. The walls are still cool and so is the air.

There are long tables in this room, and at least three dozen empty chairs--so Waterhouse nips in tiny whiffs of air at first, terrified that he will smell dead people. But he doesn't.

It figures. They're in the center of the rock. There's only one way into the room. No way to get a good draft through this place--no blowtorch effect--no burning at all, apparently. This room was bypassed. The air is as thick as cold gravy.

"Found forty dead in this room," the escort says.

"Dead of what?"

"Asphyxiation."

"Officers?"

"One Japanese captain. The rest were slaves."

Before the war started, the term "slave" was, to Lawrence Waterhouse, as obsolete as "cooper" or "chandler." Now that the Nazis and the Nipponese have revived the practice, he hears it all the time. War's weird.

His eyes have been adjusting to the dim light ever since they stepped into the chamber. There's a single 25-watt bulb for the whole cavern and the walls absorb nearly all of the light.

He can see squarish things on the tables, one in front of each chair. When he first came in he assumed that these were sheets of paper--indeed, some of them are. But as his vision gets better he can see that most of them are hollow frames, sprinkled with abstract patterns of round dots.

He fumbles for his flashlight and nails the switch. Mostly all it does is create a fuzzy yellow cone of oily smoke, swirling fatly and lazily in front of him. He steps forward shooing the smoke out of his way, and bends over the table.

It's an abacus, its beads still frozen in the middle of some calculation. Two feet down the table is another. Then another.

He turns to face the Army guy. "What's the plural of abacus?"

"Beg pardon, sir?"

"Shall we say abaci?"

"Whatever you say, sir."

"Were any of these abaci touched by any of your men?"

There is a flurry of discussion. The Army guy has to confer with several enlisted men, dispatch gofers to interview people, and make a couple of phone calls. This is a good sign; there are a lot of men who would just say "no, sir," or whatever they thought Waterhouse wanted to hear, and then he would never know whether they were telling the truth. This guy seems to understand that it's important for Waterhouse to get an honest answer.

Waterhouse walks up and down the rows of tables with his hands clasped carefully behind his back, looking at the abaci. Next to most of them is a sheet of paper, or a whole notebook, with a pencil handy. These are all covered with numbers. From place to place, he sees a Chinese character.

"Did any of you see the bodies of these slaves?" he says to an enlisted man.

"Yes, sir. I helped carry 'em out."

"Did they look like Filipinos?"

"No, sir. They looked like regular Asiatics."

"Chinese, Korean, something like that?"

"Yes, sir."