Cryptonomicon (152 page)
Authors: Neal Stephenson
Tags: #Literature, #U.S.A., #American Literature, #21st Century, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #v.5, #Amazon.com, #Retail
All of the Professors seem to realize it at once. They jump back as if the letter were a specimen of white phosphorus that had burst into flame. The Don is left holding it. He extends it towards Enoch the Red with a certain desperate pleading look. Enoch punishes him by being slow to accept the burden.
“Bitte, mein herr…”
“English is perfectly sufficient,” Enoch says. “Preferable, in fact.”
At the fringes of the robed and hooded mob, certain nearsighted faculty members are frantic with indignation over not having been able to read the seal. Their colleagues are muttering to them words like “Hanover” and “Ansbach.”
A man removes his hat and bows to Enoch. Then another.
“Sir, if you’d only
told
me ‘twas Daniel Waterhouse you sought, I’d have taken you
to
him without delay—and without all of this
bother
.”
“I erred by not confiding in you Ben,” Enoch says. “Do you know the way?”
“Of course!”
“Mount up,” Enoch commands. Ben needn’t be asked twice. He’s up like a spider. Enoch follows as soon as dignity and inertia will allow. They share the saddle, Ben on Enoch’s lap with his legs thrust back and wedged between Enoch’s knees and the horse’s ribcage. The horse has, overall, taken a dim view of the Ferry and the Faculty, and bangs across the plank as soon as it has been thrown down.
“Into yonder coppice, then ford the creek,” Ben suggests. “We shall lose the Professors, and perhaps find Godfrey. When we were on the ferry, I spied him going thither with a pail.”
“Is Godfrey the son of Dr. Waterhouse?”
“Indeed, sir. Two years younger than I.”
“Would his middle name, perchance, be William?”
“How’d you know that, Mr. Root?”
“He is very likely named after Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.”
“A friend of yours and Sir Isaac’s?”
“’Of mine yes. Of Sir Isaac’s no—and therein lies a tale too long to tell now.”
“Would it fill a book?”
“In truth, ‘twould fill
several
—and it is not even finished yet.”
“When shall it be finished?”
“At times, I fear never. But you and I shall hurry it to its final act today, Ben. How much farther to the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts?”
Ben shrugs. “It is halfway between Charlestown and Harvard. But close to the river. More than a mile. Perhaps less than two.”
End of
Quicksilver
excerpt
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
CRYPTONOMICON. Copyright © 1999 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
“Stephensonia/Cryptonomica.” Copyright © 1999-2003 by Neal Stephenson.
Excerpt from
Quicksilver
copyright © 2003 by Neal Stephenson
EPub Edition MAY © 2003 ISBN 9780061792571
First Avon Books paperback printing: November 2002
First HarperPerennial paperback printing: June 2000
First Avon Books hardcover printing: May 1999
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*
1940 being a good year to begin experimenting with venereal diseases in that the new injectable penicillin was just becoming available
*
As the Nipponese were invariably called by Marines, who never used a three-syllable word where a three-letter one would do.
*
“Hypo” is a military way of saying the letter H. Bright boy Waterhouse infers that there must be at least seven others: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.
*
Assuming, provisionally, that Alan is wrong and that human brains are not machines.
*
An evident paradox, but nothing out of the ordinary—being out of America has just made this kind of thing more obvious to Randy.
*
A deprecatory term for a fighting man not good enough to be in the Corps.
*
Men with experience in Asia use the word “Nip.” The Colonel’s use of “Jap” suggests that his career has been spent in the Atlantic and/or Caribbean.
*
He has no hard data to back this up; it just seems like a cool idea.
*
He has made up his mind that he will use the English words rather than making a spectacle of himself by trying to pronounce the Qwghlmian ones.
*
According to the
E.Q.,
derived from lichen.
*
Cantrell alludes to the fact that Plan One brought them a couple of million dollars in seed money from a venture capital outfit in San Mateo called the Springboard Group.
*
Shaftoe had had nothing to do for the last couple of weeks except play Hearts using
KNOW YOUR ENEMY
cards, so he could now peg model numbers of obscure Kraut observation planes.
*
The first one,
mì,
meaning “secret” and the second one,
fú,
having a dual connotation meaning, on the one hand, a symbol or mark, and on the other hand, Taoist magic.
*
Ever since the four-wheel Enigma was broken.
*
Baudot code is what teletypes use. Each of the 32 characters in the teletype alphabet has a unique number assigned to it. This number can be represented as a five-digit binary number, that is, five ones or zeroes, or (more useful) five holes, or absences of holes, across a strip of paper tape. Such numbers can also be represented as patterns of electrical voltages, which can be sent down a wire, or over the radio waves, and printed out at the other end. Lately, the Germans have been using encrypted Baudot-code messages for communications between high-level command posts; e.g., between Berlin and the various Army group headquarters. At Bletchley Park, this category of encryption schemes is called Fish, and the Colossus machine is being built specifically to break it.
*
Half an hour ago, as Epiphyte Corp. was gathering in the lobby, a big black Mercedes came in, fresh from the airport. 747s come into Kinakuta four times a day, and from the time that a person presents himself at the registration desk of his luxury hotel, you can figure out which city he flew in from. These guys came in from Los Angeles. Three Latino men: a middle-aged fellow of great importance, a somewhat younger assistant, and a palooka. They were met in the lobby by the solitary fellow who showed up late yesterday with the cellphone.
*
This is dry humor, and is received as such by everyone in the room; at this point in the war, a U-boat could no more run up the English Channel than it could travel up the Mississippi, sink a few barges in Dubuque, and make its escape.
*
Nipponese Army-speak for “retreat.”
*
It goes without saying that the Finns have to have their own
sui generis
brand of automatic weapon.
*
This phrase is a Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe parody.