The prongs, called Sghrs, are basaltic columns. This being the middle of the Second World War, and Outer Qwghlm being the part of the British Isles closest to the action of the Battle of the Atlantic, they are now flecked with little white radio shacks and hairy with antennas. There is a fourth sghr, much lower than the others and easily mistaken for a mere hillock, that rises above Outer Qwghlm’s only harbor (and, indeed, only settlement, not counting the naval base on the other side). On top of this fourth sghr is the castle that is the nominal home of Nigel St. John Gloamthorpby-Woadmire and that is to be the new headquarters of Detachment 2702.
Five minutes’ walk encompasses the whole town. A furious rooster chases a feeble sheep down the main street. There is snow at the higher elevations, but just grey slush down here, which is indistinguishable from the grey cobblestones until you step on it and fall down on your ass. The Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana had made much use of the definite article—the Town, the Castle, the Hotel, the Pub, the Pier. Waterhouse stops in at the Shithouse to deal with some aftershocks of the sea voyage, and then walks up the Street. The Automobile pulls up alongside and offers him a ride; it turns out to be the Taxi, too. It takes him round the Park where he notices the Statue (ancient Qwghlmians thrashing hapless Vikings); this gesture that does not go unnoted by the Taxi Driver, who veers into the Park to give him a better look.
The Statue is the sort that has a great deal to say and covers a correspondingly large expanse of real estate. Its pedestal is a slab of native basalt, covered on at least one side with what Waterhouse recognizes, from the Encyclopedia, as Qwghlmian runes. To an ignorant philistine, these might look like an endless, random series of sans-serif Xs, Is, Vs, hyphens, asterisks, and upside-down Vs. But it is an enduring source of pride to—
“We didn’t care for those Romans and that Julius Caesar fellow,” observes the taxi driver, “and we weren’t too taken with their alphabet either.”
Indeed the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana features a lengthy article about the local system of runes. The author of this article has such a chip on his shoulder that the thing is almost physically painful to read. The Qwghlmian practice of eschewing the use of curves and loops, forming all glyphs out of straight lines, far from being crude—as some English scholars have asserted—gives the script a limpid austerity. It is an admirably functional style of writing in a place where (after all the trees were cut down by the English) most of the literate intellectual class suffered from chronic bilateral frostbite.
Waterhouse has rolled down the window so that he can get a clearer view; apparently someone has lost the Squeegee. The chill breeze washing over his face finally begins to clear away his seasickness, to the point where he begins to wonder how he should go about making contact with the Whore.
Then he realizes, with some disappointment, that if the Whore has half a brain in her head, she’s across the island at the naval base.
“Who’s the wretch?” Waterhouse asks. He points to a corner of the statue, where a scrawny, downtrodden loser, with an iron collar welded around his neck and a chain dangling from that, quivers and quails at the carnage being meted out by the strapping Qwghlmian he-men. Waterhouse already knows the answer, but he can’t resist asking.
“Hakh!” blurts the taxi driver, as if he is working up a loogie. “He is from Inner Qwghlm, I can only suppose.”
“Of course.”
This exchange seems to have put the driver into a foul and vengeful mood that can only be assuaged with some fast driving. There are a dozen or more switchbacks in the road up to the Castle, each one glazed with black ice and fraught with mortal danger. Waterhouse is glad he’s not walking it, but the switchbacks and the skating motion of the taxi revive his motion sickness.
“Hakh!” the driver says, when they are about three-quarters of the way up, and nothing has been said for several minutes. “They practically laid out the welcome mat for the Romans. They spread their legs for the Vikings. There are probably Germans over there now!”
“Speaking of bile,” Waterhouse says, “I need you to pull over. I’ll walk from here.”
The driver is startled and miffed, but he relents when Waterhouse explains that the alternative is a lengthy cleanup job. He even drives Duffel up to the top of the sghr and drops it off.
Detachment 2702 arrives at the Castle some fifteen minutes later in the person of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse USN, who is serving as the advance party. The walk gives him time to get his story straight, to get himself into character. Chattan has warned him that there will be servants, and that they will notice things, and that they will gossip. It would be much more convenient if the servants could simply be packed off to the mainland for the duration, but this would be a discourtesy to the duke. “You will,” Chattan said, “have to work out a modus vivendi.” Once Waterhouse had looked this term up, he agreed heartily.
The castle is a mound of rubble about the size of the Pentagon. The lee corner has been fitted out with a functional roof, electrical wiring, and a few other frills such as doors and windows. In this area, which is all Waterhouse gets to see for that first afternoon and evening, you can forget you are on Outer Qwghlm and pretend that you are in some greener and balmier place such as the Scottish Highlands.
The next morning, accompanied by the butler, Ghnxh, he strikes out into other parts of the building and is delighted to find that you can’t even reach them without going outside; the internal connecting passages have been mortared shut to stanch the seasonal migrations of skrrghs (pronounced something like “skerries”), the frisky, bright-eyed, long-tailed mammals that are the mascot of the islands. This compartmentalization, while inconvenient, will be good for security.
Both Waterhouse and Ghnxh are encased in planklike wrappings of genuine Qwghlm wool, and the latter carries the GALVANICK LUCIPHER. The Galvanick Lucipher is of antique design. Ghnxh, who is about a hundred years old, can only smile in condescension at Waterhouse’s U.S. Navy flashlight. In the sotto voce tones one might use to correct an enormous social gaffe, he explains that the galvanick lucipher is of such a superior design as to make any further reference to the Navy model a grating embarrassment for everyone concerned. He leads Waterhouse back to a special room behind the room behind the room behind the room behind the pantry, a room that exists solely for maintenance of the galvanick lucipher and the storage of its parts and supplies. The heart of the device is a hand-blown spherical glass jar comparable in volume to a gallon jug. Ghnxh, who suffers from a pretty advanced case of either hypothermia or Parkinson’s, maneuvers a glass funnel into the neck of the jar. Then he wrestles a glass carboy from a shelf. The carboy, labeled AQUA REGIA, is filled with a fulminant orange liquid. He removes its glass stopper, hugs it, and heaves it over so that the orange fluid begins to glug out into the funnel and thence into the jar. Where it splashes out onto the tabletop, something very much like smoke curls up as it eats holes just like the thousands of other holes already there. The fumes get into Waterhouse’s lungs; they are astoundingly corrosive. He staggers out of the room for a while.
When he ventures back, he finds Ghnxh whittling an electrode from an ingot of pure carbon. The jar of aqua regia has been capped off now, and a variety of anodes, cathodes, and other working substances are suspended in it, held in place by clamps of hammered gold. Thick wires, in insulating sheathes of hand-knit asbestos, twist out of the jar and into the business end of the galvanick lucipher: a copper salad bowl whose mouth is closed off by a Fresnel lens like the ones on a lighthouse. When Ghnxh gets his carbon whittled to just the right size and shape, he fits it into a little hatch in the side of this bowl, and casually throws a Frankensteinian blade switch. A spark pops across the contacts like a firecracker.
For a moment, Waterhouse thinks that one wall of the building has collapsed, exposing them to the direct light of the sun. But Ghnxh has simply turned on the galvanick lucipher, which soon becomes about ten times brighter, as Ghnxh adjusts a bronze thumbscrew. Crushed with shame, Waterhouse puts his N
avy flashlight back into its prissy little belt holster, and precedes Ghnxh out of the room, the galvanick lucipher casting palpable warmth on the back of his neck. “We’ve got about two hours before she goes dead on us,” Ghnxh says significantly.
They work out a modus vivendi, all right: Waterhouse kicks an old door open and then Ghnxh strides into the room that is on the other side and sweeps the beam of the lantern around as if it were a flamethrower, driving back dozens or hundreds of squealing skerries. Waterhouse clambers cautiously into the room, typically making his way over the collapsed remnants of whatever roof or story used to be overhead. He gives the place a quick inspection, trying to gauge how much effort would be required to make it liveable for any more advanced organism.
Half of the castle has, at one point or another, been burned down by a combination of Barbary corsairs, lightning bolts, Napoleon, and smoking in bed. The Barbary corsairs did the best job of it (probably just trying to stay warm), or maybe it’s just that the elements have had longer to decompose what little was left behind by the flames. In any case, in that section of the castle, Waterhouse finds a place where there’s not too much rubble to shovel out, and where they can quickly enclose an adequate space with a combination of tarps and planks. It is diametrically opposed to the part of the castle that is still inhabited, which exposes it to winter storms but protects it from the prying eyes of the staff. Waterhouse paces off some rough measurements, then goes to his room, leaving Ghnxh to see to the decommissioning of the galvanick lucipher.
Waterhouse sketches out some plans for the upcoming work, at long last putting his hitherto misspent engineering skills to some use. He draws up a bill of required materials, naturally involving a good many numbers: 100 8’ 2 x 4s is a typical entry. He writes out the list a second time, in words not numbers: ONE HUNDRED EIGHT FOOT TWO BY FOURS. This wording is potentially confusing, so he changes it to TWO BY FOUR BOARDS ONE HUNDRED COUNT LENGTH EIGHT FEET.
Next he pulls a sheet of what looks like ledger paper, divided vertically into groups of five columns. Into these columns he transcribes the message, ignoring spaces:
T W O B Y
F O U R B
O A R D S
O N E H U
N D R E D
C O U N T
L E N G T
H E I G H
T F E E T
and so on. Wherever he encounters a letter J he writes I in its stead, so that JOIST comes out as IOIST. He only uses every third line of the page.
Ever since he left Bletchley Park, he has been carrying several sheets of onionskin paper around in his breast pocket; when he sleeps, he puts them under his pillow. Now he takes them out and selects one page, which has a serial number typed across the top and is otherwise covered with neatly typed letters like this:
A T H O P
C O G N Q
D L T U I
C A P R H
M U L E P
and so on, all the way down to the bottom of the page.
These sheets were typed up by a Mrs. Tenney, an aged vicar’s wife who works at Bletchley Park. Mrs. Tenney has a peculiar job which consists of the following: she takes two sheets of onionskin paper and puts a sheet of carbon paper between them and rolls them into a typewriter. She types a serial number at the top. Then she turns the crank on a device used in bingo parlors, consisting of a spherical cage containing twenty-five wooden balls, each with a letter printed on it (the letter J is not used). After spinning the cage the exact number of times specified in the procedure manual, she closes her eyes, reaches through a hatch in the cage, and removes a ball at random. She reads the letter off the ball and types it, then replaces the ball, closes the hatch, and repeats the process. From time to time, serious-looking men come into the room, exchange pleasantries with her, and take away the sheets that she has produced. These sheets end up in the possession of men like Waterhouse, and men in infinitely more desperate and dangerous circumstances, all over the world. They are called one-time pads.
He copies the letters from the one-time pad into the empty lines beneath his message:
T W O B Y
A T H O P
F O U R B
C O G N Q
O A R D S
D L T U I
O N E H U
C A P R H
N D R E D
M U L E P
When he is finished, two out of every three lines are occupied.
Finally, he returns to the top of the page one last time and begins to consider the letters two at a time. The first letter in the message is T. The first letter from the one-time pad, directly below it in the same column, is A.
A is the first letter in the alphabet and so Waterhouse, who has been doing this cipher stuff for much too long, thinks of it as being synonymous with the number 1. In the same way, T is equivalent to 19 if you are working in a J-less alphabet. Add 1 to 19 and you get 20, which is the letter U. So, in the first column beneath T and A, Waterhouse writes a U.
The next vertical pair is W and T, or 22 and 19, which in normal arithmetic add up to 41, which has no letter equivalent; it’s too large. But it has been many years since Waterhouse did normal arithmetic. He has retrained his mind to work in modular arithmetic—specifically, modulo 25, which means that you divide everything by 25 and consider only the remainder. 41 divided by 25 is 1 with a remainder of 16. Throw away the 1 and the 16 translates into the letter Q, which is what Waterhouse writes in the second column. In the third column, O and H give 14 + 8 = 22 which is W. In the fourth, B and O give 2 + 14 = 16 which is Q. And in the fifth, Y and P give 24 + 15 which is 39. 39 divided by 25 is 1 with a remainder of 14. Or, as Waterhouse would phrase it, 39 modulo 25 equals 14. The letter for 14 is O. So the first code group looks like
T W O B Y
A T H O P
U Q W Q O
By adding the random sequence ATHOP onto the meaningful sequence TWOBY, Waterhouse has produced undecipherable gibberish. When he has enciphered the entire message in this way, he takes out a new page and copies out only the ciphertext—UQWQO and so on.
The duke has a cast-iron telephone which he has put at Waterhouse’s disposal. Waterhouse heaves it out of its cradle, rings the operator, places a call across the island to the naval station, and gets through to a radio man. He reads the ciphertext message to him letter by letter. The radio man copies it down and informs Waterhouse that it will be transmitted forthwith.
Very soon, Colonel Chattan, down in Bletchley Park, will receive a message that begins with UQWQO and goes on in that vein. Chattan possesses the other copy of Mrs. Tenney’s one-time pad. He will write out the ciphertext first, using every third line. Beneath the ciphertext he will copy in the text from the one-time pad:
U Q W Q O
A T H O P
He will then perform a subtraction where Waterhouse performed an addition. U minus A means 20 minus 1 which equals 19 which gives the letter T. Q minus T means 16 minus 19 which equals -3, giving us 22 which is W. And so on. Having deciphered the whole message, he’ll get to work, and eventually two by fours one hundred count will show up at the Pier.
WHY
* * *
EPIPHYTE CORP.’S BUSINESS plan is about an inch thick, neither fat nor skinny as these things go. The interior pages are slickly and groovily desktop-published out of Avi’s laptop. The covers are rugged hand-laid paper of rice chaff, bamboo tailings, free-range hemp, and crystalline glacial meltwater made by wizened artisans operating out of a mist-shrouded temple hewn from living volcanic rock on some island known only to aerobically gifted, Spandex-sheathed Left Coast travel bores. An impressionistic map of the South China Sea has been dashed across these covers by molecularly reconstructed Ming Dynasty calligraphers using brushes of combed unicorn mane dipped into ink made of grinding down charcoal slabs fashioned by blind stylite monks from hand-charred fragments of the True Cross.
The actual content of the business plan hews to a logical structure straight out of the Principia Mathematica. Less
er entrepreneurs purchase business-plan-writing software: packages of boilerplate text and spreadsheets, craftily linked together so that you need only go through and fill in a few blanks. Avi and Beryl have written enough business plans between the two of them that they can smash them out from brute memory. Avi’s business plans tend to go something like this:
MISSION: At [name of company] it is our conviction that [to do the stuff we want to do] and to increase shareholder value are not merely complementary activities—they are inextricably linked.
PURPOSE: To increase shareholder value by [doing stuff]
EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING (printed on a separate page, in red letters on a yellow background): Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly-up and only returned her ninety-nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril—you are dead certain to lose everything you’ve got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.