The gaffer says something longer and more complicated. After a while, Waterhouse (now wearing his cryptoanalyst hat, searching for meaning midst apparent randomness, his neural circuits exploiting the redundancies in the signal) realizes that the man is speaking heavily accented English.
The word's came out of Randy's mouth before he had time to think better of it. "The information superhighway is just a fucking metaphor! Give me a break!" he said.
There was a silence as everyone around the table winced in unison. Dinner had now, officially, crashed and burned. all they could do now was grab their ankles, put their heads between their knees, and wait for the wreckage to slide to a halt.s
“Thats' a predictable answer," Kepler snorts. "Are we going to have real conversation here, Randy, or should we invite our PR people into the room and exchange press releases?”
An open scroll is fixed to the top of the crucifix; it says I.N.R.I. Goto Dengo spends a long time trying to fathom this. I Need Rapid something? Initiate Nail Removal Immediately?
No one, of course, is more familiar with staggering natural disasters than the Nipponese, with the possible exception of some peoples who are now extinct and therefore unable to bid on jobs like this.
But this was rooted in a naive view of what Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank - a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed the product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium.
Turing figured out something entirely different, something unspeakably strange and radical.
He figured out that mathematicians, unlike carpenters, only needed to have one tool in their toolbox, if it were the right sort of tool. Turing realized that it should be possible to build a meta-machine that could be reconfigured in such a way that it would do any task you could conceivably do with information. It would be a protean device that could turn into any tool you could ever need. Like a pipe organ changing into a different instrument every time you hit a preset button.
“So, you know Andrew Loeb,” Cantrell says. It's clear he's basically dismayed by this and yet sort of impressed too, as if he'd just learned that Randy had once beaten a man to death with his bare hands and then just never bothered to mention it.
“Are they true universal Turing machines?” Waterhouse blurts. He is in the grip of a stunning vision of what Bletchley Park might in, in fact, be: a secret kingdom in which Alan has somehow found the resources needed to realize his great vision. A kingdom ruled not by men but by information, where humbe buildings made of + signs house Universal Machines that can be configured to perform any computable operation.
Given enough time and enough vacuum tubes, a tool might be invented to sum a column of numbers, and another one to keep track of inventories and another one to alphabetize lists of words. A well-equipped business would have one of each: gleaming cast-iron monsters with heat waves rising out of their grilles, emblazoned with logos like ETC and Siemens and Hollerith, each carrying out its own specialized task. Just as a carpenter had a miter box and a dovetail jig and clawhammer in his box.
Within a month of his arrival, Randy solved some trivial computer problems for one of the other grad students. A week later, the chairman of the astronomy department called him over and said, "So, you're the UNIX guru." At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this attention, when he should have recognized them as bone-chilling words.
The next time Waterhouse is really aware of what's going on, he is sitting in the duke's office. He thinks there has been some routine polite conversation along the way, but there is never any point in actually monitoring that kind of thing. Tea is offered to him, and is accepted, for the second or third time, but fails to materialize.
He realizes something: The Americans must have done the impossible: broken all of their codes. That explains Midway, it explains the Bismarck Sea, Hollandia, everything. It especially explains why Yamamoto - who ought to be sipping green tea and practicing calligraphy in a misty garden - is, in point of fact, on fire and hurtling through the jungle at a hundred miles per hour in a chair closely pursued by tons of flaming junk.
Brilliant spots of light are streaking wildly around the inside of the plane, like ball lightning, but - and this is far from obvious at first - they are actually projected against the wall of the plane, like flashlight beams. He back-traces the beams, taking advantage of a light haze of vaporized hydraulic fluid that has begun to accumulate in the air, and finds that they originate in a series of small circular holes that some asshole has punched through the skin of the plane while he was sleeping. The sun is shining through these holes, always in the same direction of course; but the plane is going every which way.
Root doesn't laugh. Either he's pissed off that Shaftoe successfully bullshitted him, or he doesn't enjoy corpse-looting humor
The family Altamira is vast enough to constitute an ethnic group unto itself, and all of them live in the same building - practically in the same room.
It seems like protocol demands a lot of serious social drinking - now Randy's inadvertently challenged these guys politeness by ordering them beer, and they have to demonstrate that they will not be bested in any such contest. Tables get pushed together and everything gets just unbelievably jovial. Eb has to order some beer for everyone too. Pretty soon things have degenerated into karaoke.
Alan says, "When we want to sink a convey, we send out an observation plane first. It is ostensibly an observation plane. Of course, to observe is not its real duty - We already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed - That is, to fly close enough to the convoy that it will be noticed by the lookouts on the ships. The ships will then send out a radio message to the effect that they have been sighted by an Allied observation plane. Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not found it suspicious - At least, not quite so monstrously suspicious that we knew exactly where to go."
Radio does not, in general, go around corners. This can be a real pain when you are conquering the world, which is inconveniently round, placing all of your most active military units over the horizon.
Manila is only half an hour behind them, but it might as well be a million miles away.
He remembers Nanking, and what the Nips did there. What happened to the women.
Once, long ago, there was a city named Manila. There was a girl there. Her face and name are best forgotten. Bobby Shaftoe starts forgetting just as fast as he can.
Beck summons the medic again, and the medic gives him the rest of the syringe. Shaftoe's never felt better. What a fucking deal! He's getting morphine out of the Germans in exchange for telling them GERMAN military secrets.
The room contain a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluid so higly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugst of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yes, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan's speech. It is a marvel that can only be explained by the power of the brain over body, and, in turn, by the power of cultural conditioning over the brain.
“I think it's clear," Randy said, "that if you are ignorant of a particular subject, that your opinion is completely worthless. If I'm sick, I don't ask a plumber for advice. I go to a doctor. Likewise, if I have a question about the Internet, I will seek opinions from people who know about it.”
Watching the Japanese rack up losses, Waterhouse wonders if anyone in Tokyo has bothered to break out the abacus and run the numbers on this Second World War thing.
He had noticed a pink mist in the cabin, and supposed that it was produced by a hydraulic fluid leak. But the hydraulic system now seems hunky-dory, and the stuff on the floor of the plane is not a petroleum product. It is the same red fluid that figured so prominently in Shaftoe's nightmare. It is streaming downhill from the direction of Lieutenant Ethridge's cozy nest, and the Lieutenant is no longer snoring.
Until this point, the gold bar has signified nothing to Waterhouse - it's just a bulk sample of a chemical element, like a lead weight or a flask of mercury. But the fact that it might convey information is quite interesting.
In other circumstances, the religious reference would make Randy uncomfortable, but here it seems like the only appropriate thing to say. Think what you will about religious people, they always have something to say at times like this. What would an atheist come up with? 'Yes, the organisms inhabiting that submarine must have lost their higher neural functions over a prolonged period of time and eventually turned into pieces of rotten meat. So what?'
Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in-between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank. None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts.
Waterhouse and Shaftoe are indeed sent over to U-553 on a sort of trolley contraption that rolls along a stretched cable. The sailors put life jackets on them first, as a sort of hilarious token gesture, so that if they avoid being smashed to bits they can die of hypothermia instead of drowning.
Alan says, "The Germans have fewer, and much noisier channels. Unless we continue to do stunningly idiotic things like sinking convoys in the fog, they will never receive any clear and unmistakable indications that we have broken Enigma."