Cryptonomicon

Waterhouse and a few dozen strangers are standing and sitting in an extraordinarily long, narrow room that rocks from side to side. The room is lined with windows but no light comes into them, only sound: a great deal of rumbling, rattling, and screeching. Everyone is pensive and silent, as if they were sitting in church waiting for the service to kick off.

Waterhouse is standing up gripping a ceiling-mounted protuberance that keeps him from being rocked right onto his can. For the last couple of minutes he has been staring at a nearby poster providing instructions on how to put on a gas mask. Waterhouse, like everyone else, is carrying one such device with him in a small dun canvas shoulder bag. Waterhouse's looks different from everyone else's because it is American and military. It has drawn a stare or two from the others.

On the poster is a lovely and stylish woman with white skin, and auburn hair which appears to have been chemically melted and reset into its current shape at a quality salon. She stands upright, her spine like a flagpole, chin in the air, elbows bent, hands ritualistically posed: fingers splayed, thumbs sticking straight up in the air just in front of her face. A sinister lump dangles between her hands, held in a cat's-cradle of khaki strapping. Her upthrust thumbs are the linchpins of this tidy web.

Waterhouse has been in London for a couple of days now and so he knows the next part of the story. He would know this pose anywhere. This woman is poised for the chin thrust. If gas ever falls on the capital, the gas rattles will sound and the tops of the massive mailboxes, which have all been treated with special paint, will turn black. Twenty million thumbs will point into the greenish, poison sky, ten million gas masks will dangle from them, ten million chins will thrust. He can just imagine the crisp luscious sound of this woman's soft white skin forcing itself into the confining black rubber.

Once the chin-thrust is complete, all is well. You have to get the straps neatly arranged atop your auburn permanent and get indoors, but the worst danger is past. The British gas masks have a squat round fitting on the front to allow exhalation, which looks exactly like the snout of a pig, and no woman would be caught dead in such a thing if the models in the gas mask posters were not such paragons of high-caste beauty.

Something catches his eye out in the darkness beyond the window. The train has reached one of those parts of the Underground where dim gun-barrel-colored light sifts down, betraying the stygian secrets of the Tube. Everyone in the car blinks, glances, and draws breath. The World has rematerialized around them for a moment. Fragments of wall, encrusted trusses, bundles of cable hang in space out there, revolving slowly, like astronomical bodies, as the train works its way past.

The cables catch Waterhouse's eye: neatly bracketed to the stone walls in parallel courses. They are like the creepers of some plutonic ivy that spreads through the darkness of the Tube when the maintenance men aren't paying attention, seeking a place to break out and up into the light.

When you walk along the street, up there in the Overground, you see the first tendrils making their way up the ancient walls of the buildings. Neoprene-jacketed vines that grow in straight lines up sheer stone and masonry and inject themselves through holes in windowframes, homing in particularly on offices. Sometimes they are sheathed in metal tubes. Sometimes the owners have painted them over. But all of them share a common root system that flourishes in the unused channels and crevices of the Underground, converging on giant switching stations in deep bomb-proof vaults.

The train invades a cathedral of dingy yellow light, and groans to a stop, hogging the aisle. Lurid icons of national paranoia glow in the niches and grottoes. An angelic chin-thrusting woman anchors one end of the moral continuum. At the opposite we have a succubus in a tight skirt, sprawled on a davenport in the midst of a party. smirking through her false eyelashes as she eavesdrops on the naive young servicemen gabbing away behind her.

Signs on the wall identify this as Euston in a tasteful sans-serif that screams official credibility. Waterhouse and most of the other people get off the train. After fifteen minutes or so of ricocheting around the station's precincts, asking directions and puzzling out timetables, Waterhouse finds himself sitting aboard an intercity train bound for Birmingham. Along the way, it is promised, it will stop at a place called Bletchley.

Part of the reason for the confusion is that there is another train about to leave from an adjacent siding, which goes straight to Bletchley, its final destination, with no stops in between. Everyone on that train, it seems, is a female in a quasimilitary uniform.