Cryptonomicon

One of the RAF men peruses his papers, then steps into a small guardhouse and stirs the crank on a telephone. Waterhouse stands there awkwardly, marveling at the weapons slung from the shoulders of the RAP men. They are, as far as he can tell, nothing more than steel pipes with a trigger mounted toward one end. A small window cut through the pipe provides a view of a coil spring nested inside. A few handles and fittings bolted on from place to place do not make the Sten gun look any less like an ill-conceived high school metal shop project.

"Captain Waterhouse? You are to proceed to the Mansion," says the guard who had spoken on the telephone. "You can't miss it."

Waterhouse walks for about fifty feet and finds that the Mansion is, indeed, tragically unmissable. He stands and stares at it for a minute, trying to fathom what the architect had been thinking. It is a busy piece of work, with an excessive number of gables. He can only suppose that the designer wanted to build what was really a large, single dwelling, but sought to camouflage it as a line of at least half a dozen wildly mismatched urban row-houses inexplicably crammed together in the middle of six hundred acres of Buckinghamshire farmland.

The place has been well looked after, but as Waterhouse draws closer, he can see black lianas climbing up the brickwork. The root system that he glimpsed in the Underground has spread beneath forest and pasture even to this place and has begun to throw its neoprene creepers upwards. But this organism is not phototropic--it does not grow towards the light, always questing towards the sun. It is infotropic. And it has spread to this place for the same reason that infotropic humans like Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and Dr. Alan Mathison Turing have come here, because Bletchley Park has roughly the same situation in the info world as the sun does in the solar system. Armies, nations, prime ministers, presidents and geniuses fall around it, not in steady planetlike orbits but in the crazy careening ellipses and hyperbolae of comets and stray asteroids.

Dr. Rudolf von Hacklheber can't see Bletchley Park, because it is the second best kept secret in the world, after Ultra Mega. But from his office in Berlin, sifting through dispatches from the Beobachtung Dienst, he can glimpse fragments of those trajectories, and dream up hypotheses to explain why they are just so. If the only logical hypothesis is that the Allies have broken Enigma, then Detachment 2702 will have failed.

Lawrence displays further credentials and enters between a pair of weathered gryphons. The mansion is nicer once you can no longer see its exterior. Its faux-rowhouse design provides many opportunities for bay windows, providing sorely needed light. The hall is held up by gothic arches and pillars made of a conspicuously low grade of brown marble that looks like vitrified sewage.

The place is startlingly noisy; there is a rushing, clattering noise, like rabid applause, permeating walls and doors, carried on a draft of hot air with a stinging, oily scent. It is the peculiar scent of electric teletypes--or teleprinters, as the Brits call them. The noise and the heat suggest there must be dozens of them in one of the mansion's lower rooms.

Waterhouse climbs a paneled stairway to what the Brits call the first floor, and find it quieter and cooler. The high panjandrums of Bletchley have their offices here. If the organization is run true to bureaucratic form, Waterhouse will never see this place again once his initial interview is finished. He finds his way to the office of Colonel Chattan, who (Waterhouse's memory jogged by the sight of the name on the door) is the fellow at the top of the chart of Detachment 2702.

Chattan rises to shake his hand. He's strawberry blond, blue-eyed, and probably would be rosy-cheeked if he didn't have such a deep desert tan at the moment. He is wearing a dress uniform; British officers have their uniforms tailor-made, it is the only way to obtain them. Waterhouse is hardly a clothes horse, but he can see at a glance that Chattan's uniform was not thrown together by Mummy in a few evenings in front of a flickering coal grate. No, Chattan has himself an honest-to-god tailor somewhere. Yet, when he speaks Waterhouse's name, he does not say "woe to hice" like the Broadway Buildings crowd. The R comes through hard and crackling and the "house" part is elongated into some thing like "hoos." He has some kind of a wild-ass accent on him, this Chattan.