Cryptonomicon

The RAF men with the Sten guns, standing watch by each door of that train, checking papers and passes, will not let him aboard. Waterhouse looks through the yellowing influence of the windows at the Bletchley girls in the train, facing each other in klatsches of four and five, getting their knitting out of their bags, turning balls of Scottish wool into balaclavas and mittens for convoy crews in the North Atlantic, writing letters to their brothers in the service and their mums and dads at home. The RAF gunmen remain by the doors until all of them are closed and the train has begun to move out of the station. As it builds speed, the rows and rows of girls, knitting and writing and chatting, blur together into something that probably looks a good deal like what sailors and soldiers the world over are commonly seeing in their dreams. Waterhouse will never be one of those soldiers, out on the front line, out in contact with the enemy. He has tasted the apple of forbidden knowledge. He is forbidden to go anywhere in the world where he might be captured by the enemy.

***

The train climbs up out of the night and into a red-brick arroyo, headed northwards out of the city. It is about three in the afternoon; that special BP train must have been carrying swing shift gals.

Waterhouse has the feeling he will not be working anything like a regular shift. His duffel bag--which was packed for him--is pregnant with sartorial possibilities: thick oiled-wool sweaters, tropical-weight Navy and Army uniforms, black ski mask, condoms.

The train slowly pulls free of the city and passes into a territory patched with small residential towns. Waterhouse feels heavy in his seat, and suspects a slight uphill tendency. They pass through a cleft that has been made across a low range of hills, like a kerf in the top of a log, and enter into a lovely territory of subtly swelling emerald green fields strewn randomly with small white capsules that he takes to be sheep.

Of course, their distribution is probably not random at all--it probably reflects local variations in soil chemistry producing grass that the sheep find more or less desirable. From aerial reconnaissance, the Germans could draw up a map of British soil chemistry based upon analysis of sheep distribution.

The fields are enclosed by old hedges, stone fences, or, especially in the uplands, long swaths of forest. After an hour or so, the forest comes right up along the left side of the train, covering a bank that rises up gently from the railway siding. The train's brakes come on gassily, and the train grumbles to a stop in a whistle-stop station. But the line has forked and ramified quite a bit, more than is warranted by the size of the station. Waterhouse stands, plants his feet squarely, squats down in a sumo wrestler's stance, and engages his duffel bag. Duffel appears to be winning as it seemingly pushes Waterhouse out the door of the train and onto the platform.

There is a stronger than usual smell of coal, and a good deal of noise coming from not far away. Waterhouse looks up the line and discovers a heavy industrial works unfurled across the many sidings. He stands and stares for a couple of minutes, as his train pulls away, headed for points north, and sees that they are in the business of repairing steam locomotives here at Bletchley Depot. Waterhouse likes trains.

But that is not why he got a free suit of clothes and a ticket to Bletchley, and so once again Waterhouse engages Duffel and gets it up the stairs to the enclosed bridge that flies over all of the parallel lines. Looking toward the station, he sees more Bletchley girls, WAAFs and WRENs, coming towards him; the day shift, finished with their work, which consists of the processing of ostensibly random letters and digits on a heavy-industrial scale. Not wanting to appear ridiculous in their sight, he finally gets Duffel maneuvered onto his back, gets his arms through the shoulder straps, and allows its weight to throw him forward across the bridge.

The WAAFs and WRENs are only moderately interested in the sight of a newly arriving American officer. Or perhaps they are only being demure. In any case, Waterhouse knows he is one of the few, but not the first. Duffel shoves him through the one-room station like a fat cop chivvying a hammerlocked drunk across the lobby of a two-star hotel. Waterhouse is ejected into a strip of open territory running along the north-south road. Directly across from him the woods rise up. Any notion that they might be woods of the inviting sort is quickly dissolved by a dense spray of gelid light glinting from the border of the wood as the low sun betrays that the place is saturated with sharpened metal. There is an orifice in the woods, spewing WAAFs and WRENs like the narrow outlet of a giant yellowjacket nest.