Riptide (20 page)

He took a seat on an outcropping of the stone foundation. No doubt Clay had been talking to others. Hatch doubted most people
would listen, except perhaps the lobstermen. They could be a superstitious lot, and talk about curses might weigh heavily.
And then that remark about the dig ruining the lobstering… Hatch just hoped it was going to be a good season.

Slowly he calmed down, letting the peace of the fort wash away his anger, listening to the faint clamor of the festival across
the meadow. He really had to control himself better. The man was an obnoxious prig, but he wasn’t worth flying off the handle
over.

It was a tranquil, womblike space, and Hatch felt he could stay there, enjoying the coolness, for hours. But he knew he should
be returning to the festival, putting up a nonchalant front, smoothing things over. In any case, he needed to be back before
the inevitable speeches began. He stood up and turned to go, and saw with surprise a stooped figure waiting in the shadows
of the archway. It stepped forward into a shaft of light.

“Professor Horn!” Hatch cried.

The man’s canny old face crinkled with delight. “I wondered when you’d notice me,” he said, advancing with his cane. He shook
Hatch’s hand warmly. “That was quite a little scene back there.”

Hatch shook his head. “I lost my temper, like an idiot. What is it about that man that gets my goat?”

“No mystery there. Clay is awkward, socially inept, morally rigid. But beneath that bitter exterior there beats a heart as
big and generous as the ocean. As violent and unknowable, too, I’ll bet. He’s a complex man, Malin; don’t underestimate him.”
The professor grasped Hatch’s shoulder. “Enough about the reverend. By God, Malin, you’re looking well. I’m prodigiously proud
of you. Harvard Medical School, research position at Mount Auburn. You were always a smart boy. Too bad it didn’t always equate
to being a good student.”

“I owe a lot of it to you,” Hatch said. He remembered afternoons in the professor’s huge Victorian house in the back meadows—poring
over his collections of rocks, beetles, and butterflies—in those last years before leaving Stormhaven.

“Nonsense. I still have your bird nest collection, by the way. Never knew where to send it after you left.”

Hatch felt a twinge of guilt. It had never occurred to him that the august professor would have wanted to hear from him. “I’m
surprised you didn’t throw that junk away.”

“Actually, it was a remarkably good collection.” He shifted his hand to Hatch’s arm and held it in a bony clasp. “See me out
the fort and across the meadow, would you? I’m a little shaky on my wheels these days.”

“I would have gotten in touch…” Hatch’s voice trailed away.

“Not a word, not even a forwarding address,” the professor said acidly. “Then I read about you in the
Globe
last year.”

Hatch turned away, feeling shame burning his face.

The professor gave a gruff snort. “No matter. According to the actuarial tables I should be dead. I’ll be eighty-nine next
Thursday, and damn you if you don’t bring me a present.”

They emerged into the sunlight of the meadow. Voices raised in laughter drifted toward them on the breeze.

“You must have heard why I came back,” Hatch said tentatively.

“Who hasn’t?” was the tart reply. The professor offered nothing further, and they walked on in silence for a moment.

“So?” Hatch said at last.

The old man looked at him inquiringly.

“So drop the other shoe,” Hatch continued. “What do you think of this treasure hunt?”

The professor walked on for a minute, then stopped and turned toward Malin, lowering his arm as he did so. “Remember,
you
asked,” he said.

Hatch nodded.

“I think you’re a goddamned fool.”

There was a moment of stunned surprise. He’d been prepared for Clay, but not for this. “What makes you say that?”

“You, of all the people on this earth, should know better. Whatever’s down there, you won’t get it out.”

“Look, Dr. Horn, we’ve got technology those old treasure hunters never even dreamed of. Hardbody sonar, proton magnetometers,
a photoreconnaissance satellite downlink. We’ve got twenty million dollars in funding, and we even have the private journal
of the man who designed the Pit.” Hatch’s voice had risen. He suddenly realized that it was very important for him to have
this man’s good opinion.

Dr. Horn shook his head. “Malin, for almost a century I’ve seen them come and go. Everyone had the latest equipment. Everyone
had gobs of money. Everyone had some crucial piece of information, some brilliant insight. It was always going to be different.
And they all ended up the same. Bankruptcy, misery, even death.” He glanced at Hatch. “Have you found any treasure yet?”

“Well, not yet,” Hatch said. “There’s been one small problem. We knew that the Pit must have an underground flood tunnel leading
to the sea, that’s why it’s always filled with water. We used dye to locate the flood tunnel’s exit on the sea floor. Only,
it seems there’s not one flood tunnel, but five, and—”

“I see,” Dr. Horn interrupted. “Just one small problem. I’ve heard that before, too. Maybe you’ll solve your problem. Only
then there will be another problem, and another, until you’re all bankrupt. Or dead. Or both.”

“But this
will
be different,” Hatch cried. “You can’t tell me it’s impossible to raise the treasure. What man created, man can defeat.”

The professor suddenly gripped Hatch’s arm again. He had alarmingly strong hands, corded like ancient tree roots, sinewy and
dry. “I knew your grandfather, Malin. He was a lot like you: young, smart as hell, promising career ahead of him, terrific
enthusiasm for life. What you just said is exactly what he said to me, word for word, fifty years ago.” He lowered his voice
to a fierce whisper. “Look at the legacy he left your family. You asked my opinion. So here it is in a nutshell. Go back to
Boston before history repeats itself.”

He turned brusquely and hobbled off, his cane flicking irritably through the grass, until he had disappeared over the brow
of the hill.

T
he next morning, a little bleary-eyed from the beer of the previous day, Hatch closeted himself in the medical hut, laying
out instruments and taking inventory. There had been a number of injuries over the last several days, but nothing more serious
than a few scrapes and a cracked rib. As he moved through his shelves, checking against a printed master list, he could hear
the monotonous hiss of surf from the nearby reefs. The sun struggled wanly through the metal-sided window, attenuated by the
omnipresent curtain of mist.

Finishing the inventory, Hatch hung his clipboard beside the shelves and glanced out the window. He could see the tall, slope-shouldered
form of Christopher St. John, walking gingerly over the rough ground of Base Camp. The Englishman dodged a heavy cable and
a length of PVC pipe, then ducked into Wopner’s quarters, his unruly gray hair barely clearing the door frame. Hatch stood
for a moment, then picked up the two black binders and exited the medical office, following the historian. Maybe there was
some progress to report on the code.

Wopner’s Base Camp office was, if anything, even more messy than his stateroom on the
Cerberus.
Small to begin with, banks of monitoring and servo control equipment made it claustrophobic. Wopner occupied the office’s
lone chair, crammed into a far corner by the relay racks that surrounded him. Cold air was blasting from two ducts overhead,
and a massive air conditioner grumbled on the far side of the wall.

Despite the air-conditioning, the room was stuffy with hot electronics, and as Hatch walked in St. John was looking for a
place to hang his jacket. His search unsuccessful, he laid it carefully on a nearby console.

“Jeez,” said Wopner, “you lay your hairy old tweed there and it’s gonna short-circuit the whole works.”

Frowning, St. John picked it up again. “Kerry, do you have a minute?” he said. “We really need to discuss this problem with
the code.”

“Do I look like I have a minute?” came the response. Wopner leaned away from his terminal with a glare. “I’ve just now finished
an all-island diagnostic. The whole ball of wax, right down to the microcode. Took an hour, even at maximum bandwidth. Everything
checks out: pumps, compressors, servos, you name it. No problems or discrepancies of any kind.”

“That’s great,” Hatch broke in.

Wopner looked at him incredulously. “Grow a brain, willya? Great? It’s frigging terrible!”

“I don’t understand.”

“We had a system crash, remember? The goddamn pumps went south on us. Afterward, I compared the island computer system with
Scylla over on the
Cerberus,
and guess what? The ROM chips on Charbydis, here, had been altered. Altered!” He angrily smacked one of the CPUs upside its
cabinet.

“And?”

“And now I run the diagnostics again, and everything’s fine. Not only that, but the entire grid shows no deviations of any
kind.” Wopner leaned forward. “No deviations. Don’t you get it? That’s a
physical and computational
impossibility.”

St. John was glancing at the equipment around him, hands tucked behind his back. “Ghost in the machine, Kerry?” he ventured.

Wopner ignored this.

“I don’t know much about computers,” St. John continued, his plummy accent filling the air, “but I do know one term: GIGO.
Garbage in, garbage out.”

“Bite me. It’s not the programming.”

“Ah. I see. Couldn’t
possibly
be human error. As I recall, all it took was one incorrect FORTRAN equation to send Mariner 1 off on some outer space scavenger
hunt, never to be heard from again.”

“The point is, things are working now,” Hatch said. “So why not move on?”

“Sure, and have it happen again. I want to know
why
all this shit failed at once.”

“You can’t do anything about it now,” St. John said. “Meanwhile, we’re falling behind schedule on the cryptanalysis. Nothing’s
worked. I’ve done some more research, and I think we’ve been far too quick to dismiss—”

“Shit on a
stick!”
Wopner snapped, wheeling toward him. “You’re not going to start mumbling about polyalphabetics again, are you, old
thing?
Look, I’m going to modify the algorithm of my brute-force attack, give it fifty percent system priority, really get things
moving. Why don’t you retire to your library? Come back at the end of the day with some useful ideas.”

St. John looked briefly at Wopner. Then he shrugged into his tweed and ducked back out into the gauzy morning light. Hatch
followed him to his own office.

“Thanks,” Hatch said, passing the two folders to St. John.

“He’s right, you know,” the historian said, taking a seat at his tidy desk and wearily pulling the old typewriter toward him.
“It’s just that I’ve tried everything else. I’ve based my attacks on all the encryption methods known during Macallan’s time.
I’ve approached it as an arithmetic problem, as an astronomic or astrologic system, as a foreign language code. Nothing.”

“What are polyalphabetics?” Hatch asked.

St. John sighed. “A polyalphabetic cipher. It’s quite simple, really. You see, most codes in Macallan’s day were simple, monophonic
substitutions. You had the regular alphabet, then you had a cipher alphabet, all higgledy-piggledy. To encode something, you
simply looked up which cipher letter matched the next regular letter in your document. Maybe the code for
s
was
y,
and the code for
e
was
z.
So, when you coded the word ‘see,’ you’d get ‘yzz.’ That’s how the cryptograms in your local newspaper work.”

“Seems clear enough.”

“Yes. But it’s not a very secure system. So what if you had several
different
cipher alphabets to work with? Let’s say instead of just one, you had ten. And, as you encrypted your document letter by
letter, you’d move through all ten cipher alphabets, and then start over again with the first. That’s a polyalphabetic cipher.
Now, ‘see’ wouldn’t just be ‘yzz.’ Each letter would be coded from a different cipher table.”

“Sounds difficult to crack.”

“Yes, they are very difficult. But Kerry’s point is that polyalphabetics weren’t used in Macallan’s day. Oh, people knew about
them. But they were considered too time-consuming, too prone to error.” St. John sighed again. “But in this case, the biggest
problem is one of concealment. If Macallan used a polyalphabetic cipher, how could he have safely hidden all the code alphabet
tables he would have needed? Just one chance look at those by Red Ned Ockham would give the whole game away. And as bright
as he was, he couldn’t have memorized them.”

“If you think there’s the chance it’s a polyalphabetic code, why don’t you try cracking it on your own?”

The corners of St. John’s lips lifted in what might have been a smile. “If I had two months, I’d be happy to give it a try.
But I don’t. Besides, I have no idea how long a key he was using, if any, or how liberally he’d strewn his nulls.”