s and ephemeral vortices. All of
these things were clearly visible, because all summer the air was full of
dust or smoke, and all winter it was full of windblown snow.
Whitman had dust devils (snow devils in the winter) in the way that
medieval Guangzhou presumably had rats. Randy followed dust devils to school
when he was a kid. Some were small enough that you could almost cup them in
your hand, and some were like small tornadoes, fifty or a hundred feet high,
that would appear on hilltops or atop shopping malls like biblical
prophecies as filtered through the low budget SFX technology and painfully
literal minded eye of a fifties epic film director. They at least scared the
bejesus out of newcomers. When Randy got bored in school, he would look at
the window and watch these things chase each other around the empty
playground. Sometimes a roughly car sized dust devil would glide across the
four square courts and between the swingsets and score a direct hit on the
jungle gym, which was an old fashioned, unpadded, child paralyzing unit
hammered together by some kind of Dark Ages ironmonger and planted in solid
concrete, a real school of hard knocks, survival of the fittest one. The
dust devil would seem to pause as it enveloped the jungle gym. It would
completely lose its form and become a puff of dust that would begin to
settle back down to the ground as all heavier than air things really ought
to. But then suddenly the dust devil would reappear on the other side of the
jungle gym and keep going. Or perhaps two dust devils would spin off in
opposite directions.
Randy spent plenty of time chasing and carrying out impromptu
experiments on dust devils while walking to and from school, to the point of
getting bounced off the grille of a shrieking Buick once when he chased a
roughly shopping cart sized one into the street in an attempt to climb into
the center of it. He knew that they were both fragile and tenacious. You
could stomp down on one of them and sometimes it would just dodge your foot,
or swirl around it, and keep going. Other times, like if you tried to catch
one in your hands, it would vanish but then you'd look up and see another
one just like it twenty feet away, running away from you. The whole concept
of matter spontaneously organizing itself into grotesquely improbable and
yet indisputably self perpetuating and fairly robust systems sort of gave
Randy the willies later on, when he began to learn about physics.
There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in
the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of
unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your
competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an
audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be
responsible for making bridges that won't fall down or airplanes that won't
suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and
who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their
teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely
nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self
esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the
engineering students, and who by definition don't want to hear about
anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the
professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air,
therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That's all there is to know
about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and
crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they
want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions.
And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the
campus.
Now that Randy's back in Whitman for the first time in several years,
watching (because it's winter) ice devils zigzagging across the Christmas
empty streets, he is inclined to take a longer view of the matter, which
goes a little something like this: these devils, these vortices, are a
consequence of hills and valleys that are probably miles and miles upwind.
Basically, Randy, who has blown in from out of town, is in a mobile frame of
mind, and is seeing things from the wind's frame of reference not the
stationary frame of reference of the little boy who rarely left town. From
the wind's frame of reference, it (the wind) is stationary and the hills and
valleys are moving things that crumple the horizon and then rush towards it
and then interfere with it and go away, leaving the wind to sort out
consequences later on down the line. And some of the consequences are dust
or ice devils. If there was more stuff in the way, like expansive cities
filled with buildings, or forests filled with leaves and branches, then that
would be the end of the story; the wind would become completely deranged and
cease to exist as a unitary thing, and all of the aerodynamic action would
be at the incomprehensible scale of micro vortices around pine needles and
car antennas.
A case in point would be the parking lot of Waterhouse House, which is
normally filled with cars and therefore a complete wind killer. You aren't
going to see dust devils at the downwind edge of a full parking lot, just a
generalized seepage of dead and decayed wind. But it is Christmas break and
there are all of three cars parked in this space, which doubles as football
overflow and hence is about the size of an artillery practice range. The
asphalt is dead monitor screen grey. A volatile gas of ice swirls across it
as freely as a sheen of fuel on warm water, except where it strikes the icy
sarcophagi of these three abandoned vehicles, which have evidently been
sitting in this otherwise empty lot for a couple of weeks now, since all of
the other cars went away on Christmas break. Each car has become the first
cause of a system of wakes and standing vortices that extends downstream for
hundreds of yards. The wind here is a glinting abrasive thing, a perpetual,
face shredding, eyeball poking tendency in the fabric of spacetime,
inhabited by vast platinum blond arcs of fire that are centered on the low
winter sun. Crystalline water is suspended in it all the time, is why:
shards of ice that are smaller than snowflakes probably just individual legs
of snowflakes that have been sheared off and borne into the air as the wind
snapped and rattled over the crests of Canadian snow dunes. Once airborne,
they stay airborne unless they find themselves ducted into some pocket of
dead air: the eye of a vortex or the still boundary layer of a dead car's
parking lot wake. And so over the weeks the vortices and standing waves have
become visible, like three dimensional virtual reality renderings of
themselves.
Waterhouse House rises above this tableau, a high rise dorm that no
person prominent enough to have a dorm named after him would want to have
named after him. Out of its climatically inappropriate acreage of picture
window shines the same embarrassing, greenish light radiated by algae
scummed domestic aquaria. Janitors are going through it with machines the
size of hot dog carts, wrangling these mile long coils of thumb thick orange
power cable, steaming beer vomit and artificial popcorn butter lipids up out
of the thin grey mats that, when Randy was there, seemed not so much like
carpet as references to carpeting or carpet signifiers. When Randy now pulls
into the main vehicle entrance, past the big tombstone that says WATERHOUSE
HOUSE, he cannot but look straight out the windshield and through the dorm's
front windows and straight at a large portrait of his grandfather, Lawrence
Pritchard Waterhouse one of a dozen or so figures, mostly departed now, who
compete for the essentially bogus title of "inventor of the digital
computer." The portrait is securely bolted to the cinderblock wall of the
lobby and imprisoned under a half inch thick slab of Plexiglas that must be
replaced every couple of years, as it fogs from repeated scrubbings and
petty vandalizations. Seen through this milky cataract, Lawrence Pritchard
Waterhouse is grimly resplendent in full doctoral robes. He has one foot up
on something, his elbow planted on the elevated knee, and has tucked his
robes back behind the other arm and planted his fist on his hip. It is meant
to be a sort of dynamic posture, but to Randy, who at the age of five was
present for its unveiling, it has a kind of incredulous what the hell are
those little people doing down there vibe about it.
Other than the three dead cars in their shells of hardened, dust
infused ice, there is nothing in the parking lot save about two dozen items
of antique furniture and a few other treasures such as a complete sterling
silver tea service and a dark, time wracked trunk. As Randy pulls in with
his Uncle Red and his Aunt Nina, he notes that the Shaftoe boys have
discharged the responsibilities for which they will be drawing minimum wage
plus twenty five percent all day long: namely they have moved all of these
items from where Uncle Geoff and Auntie Anne placed them back to the Origin.
In a gesture of companionship and/or uncle esque bonhomie, Uncle Red,
much to the evident resentment of Aunt Nina, has claimed the Acura's
passenger seat, leaving Aunt Nina marooned in the back where she evidently
feels much more psychically isolated than the situation would seem to
warrant. She makes lateral sliding motions trying to center the eyes of
first Randy, then Uncle Red, in the rearview minor. Randy has taken to
relying solely on the outside rearview mirrors during the ten minute drive
over from the hotel, because when he glances at the inside one he keeps
seeing Aunt Nina's dilated pupils aimed down his throat like twin shotgun
barrels. The blast of the heater/defroster forms a pocket of auditory
isolation back there which on top of her already prominent feelings of near
animal rage and stress have left her volatile and obviously dangerous.
Randy heads straight for the Origin, as in the intersection of the X
and Y axes, which is marked by a light pole with its very own multiton
system of wind deposited wakes and vortices.
"Look," says Uncle Red, "all we want to accomplish here is to make sure
that your mother's legacy, if that is the correct term for the possessions
of one who is not actually dead but merely moved into a long term care
facility, is equally divided among her five offspring. Am I right?"
This is not addressed to Randy, but he nods anyway, trying to show a
united front. He has been grinding his teeth for two days straight; the
places where his jaw muscles anchor to his skull have become the foci of
tremendous radiating systems of surging and pulsing pain.
"I think you'd agree that an equal division is all we want," Uncle Red
continues. "Correct?"
After a worrisomely long pause, Aunt Nina nods. Randy manages to
glimpse her face in the rearview as she makes another dramatic lateral move,
and sees there a look of almost nauseous trepidation, as if this equal
division concept might be some Jesuitical snare.
"Now, here's the interesting part," says Uncle Red, who is the chairman
of the mathematics department at Okaley College in Macomb, Illinois. "How do
we define 'equal'? This is what your brothers, and brothers in law, and
Randy and I were debating so late into the night last night. If we were
dividing up a stack of currency, it would be easy, because currency has a
monetary value that is printed right on its face, and the bills are
interchangeable no one gets emotionally attached to a particular dollar
bill."
"This is why we should have an objective appraiser "
"But everyone's going to disagree with what the appraiser says, Nina,
love," says Uncle Red. "Furthermore, the appraiser will totally miss out on
the emotional dimension, which evidently looms very large here, or so it
would seem, based on the, uh, let's say melodramatic character of the, uh,
discussion, if discussion isn't too dignified a term for what some might
perceive as more of a, well, catfight, that you and your sisters were
conducting all day yesterday."
Randy nods almost imperceptibly. He pulls up and parks next to the
furniture that is again clustered around the Origin. At the edge of the
parking lot, near where the Y axis (here denoting perceived emotional value)
meets a retaining wall, the Shaftoes' hot rod sits, all steamed up on the
inside.
"The question reduces," Uncle Red says, "to a mathematical one: how do
you divide up an inhomogeneous set of n objects among m people (or couples
actually); i.e., how do you partition the set into m subsets (S [sub 1],S
[sub 2], ... ,S [sub m]) such that the value of each subset is as close as
possible to being equal?"
"It doesn't seem that hard," Aunt Nina begins weakly. She is a
professor of Qwghlmian linguistics.
"It is actually shockingly difficult," Randy says. "It is closely akin
to the Knapsack Problem, which is so difficult to solve that it has been
used as the basis for cryptographic systems."
"And that's not even taking into account that each of the couples would
appraise the value of each of the n objects differently!" Uncle Red shouts.
By this point, Randy has shut off the car, and the windows have begun to
steam up. Uncle Red pulls off a mitten and begins to draw figures in the fog
on the windshield, using it like a blackboard. "For each of the m people (or
couples) there exists an n element value vector, V, where V [sub 1] is the
value that that particular couple would place on item number 1 (according to
some arbitrary numeration system) and V [sub 2] is the value they would
place on item number 2 and so on all the way up to item number n. These m
vectors, taken together, form a value matrix. Now, we can impose the
condition that each vector must total up to the same amount; i.e., we can
just arbitrarily specify some notional value for the entire collection of
furniture and other goods and impose the condition that
[img file for page 625 is not found (source)]
where [tau] is a constant."
"But we might all have different opinions as to what the total value
is, as well!" says Aunt Nina, gamely.
"That has no impact mathematically," Randy whispers.
"It is just an arbitrary scaling factor!" Uncle Red says witheringly.
"This is why I ended up agreeing with your brother Tom, though I didn't at
first, that we should take a cue from the way he and the other relativistic
physicists do it, and just arbitrarily set [tau] = 1. Which forces us to
deal with fractional values, which I thought some of the ladies, present
company excluded of course, might find confusing, but at least it emphasizes
the arbitrary nature of the scaling factor and helps to eliminate that
source of confusion." Uncle Tom tracks asteroids in Pasadena for the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory.
"There's the Gomer Bolstrood console," Aunt Nina exclaims, rubbing a
hole in the fog on her window, and then continuing to orbitally rub away
with the sleeve of her coat as if she is going to abrade an escape route
through the safety glass. "Just sitting out in the snow!"
"It's not actually precipitating," Uncle Red says, "this is just
blowing snow. It is absolutely bone dry, and if you go out and look at the
console or whatever you call it, you will find that the snow is not melting
on it at all, because it has been sitting out in the U Stor It ever since
your mother moved to the managed care facility and it has equilibrated to
the ambient temperature which I think we can all testify is well below zero
Celsius."
Randy crosses his arms over his abdomen, leans his head back, and
closes his eyes. The tendons in his neck are as stiff as subzero Silly Putty
and resist painfully.
"That console was in my bedroom from the time I was born until I left
for college," Aunt Nina says. "By any decent standard of justice, that
console is mine.
"Well, that brings me to the breakthrough that Randy and Tom and Geoff
and I finally came up with at about two A.M., namely that the perceived
economic value of each item, as complicated as that is in and of itself, viz
the Knapsack Problem, is only one dimension of the issues that have got us
all on such a jagged emotional edge. The other dimension and here I really
do mean dimension in a Euclidean geometry sense is the emotional value of
each item. That is, in theory we could come up with a division of the set of
all pieces of furniture that would give you, Nina, an equal share. But such
a division might leave you, love, just deeply, deeply unsatisfied because
you didn't get that console, which, though it's obviously not as valuable as
say the grand piano, has much greater emotional value to you.
"I don't think it's out of the question that I would commit physical
violence in order to defend my rightful ownership of that console," Aunt
Nina says, suddenly reverting to a kind of dead voiced frigid calm.
"But that's not necessary, Nina, because we have created this whole
setup here just so that you can give your feelings the full expression they
deserve!"
"Okay. What do I do?" Aunt Nina says, bolting from the car. Randy and
Uncle Red hastily gather up their gloves and mittens and hats and follow her
out. She is now hovering over the console, watching the dust of ice swirl
across the dark but limpid, virtually glowing surface of the console in the
turbulent wake of her body, forming little Mandelbrotian epi epi epi
vortices.
"As Geoff and Anne did before us, and the others will do afterwards, we
are going to move each of these items to a specific position, as in (x, y)
coordinates, in the parking lots. The x axis runs this way," Uncle Red says,
facing the Waterhouse House and holding his arms out in a cruciform
attitude, "and the y axis this way." He toddles around ninety degrees so
that one of his hands is now pointing at the Shaftoes' Impala. "Perceived
financial value is measured by x. The farther in that direction it is, the
more valuable you think it is. You might even assign something a negative x
value if you think it has negative value e.g., that over stuffed chair over
there which might cost more to re upholster than it is actually worth.
Likewise, the y axis measures perceived emotional value. Now, we have
established that the console has extreme emotional value to you and so I
think that we can just go right ahead and move it down the line over to
where the Impala is located."
"Can something have negative emotional value?" Aunt Nina says, sourly
and probably rhetorically.
"If you hate it so much that just owning it would cancel out the
emotional benefits of having something like the console, then yes, Uncle Red
says.
Randy hoists the console onto his shoulder and begins to walk in a
positive y direction. The Shaftoe boys are available to hump furniture at a
moment's notice, but Randy needs to mark a bit of territory here, just to
indicate that he is not without some masculine attributes himself and so he
ends up carrying more furniture than he probably needs to. Back at the
Origin, he can hear Red and Nina going at it. "I have a problem with this,"
Nina says. "What's to prevent her from just putting every thing down at the
extreme y axis claiming that everything is terribly emotionally important to
her?" Her in this case can only mean Aunt Rachel, the wife of Tom. Rachel is
a multiethnic East Coast urbanite who is not blessed or afflicted with the
obligatory Waterhousian diffidence and so has always been regarded as a sort
of living incarnation of rapacity, a sucking maw of need. The worst case
scenario here is that Rachel somehow goes home with everything the grand
piano, the silver, the china, the Gomer Bolstrood dining room set. Hence the
need for elaborate rules and rituals, and a booty division system that is
mathematically provable as fair.
"That's where [tau sub e] and [tau sub $] enter into it," Uncle Red
says soothingly.
[img file for page 628 is not found (source)]
"All of our choices will be mathematically scaled so that they add up
to the same total values on both the emotional and financial scales. So if
someone clumped everything together in the extreme corner, then, after
scaling, it'd be as if they never expressed any preferences at all."
Randy nears the steamed up Impala. One of the doors makes a crackling
noise as superannuated weatherstripping peels away from steel. Robin Shaftoe
emerges, breathes into his cupped hands, and takes a parade rest position,
signifying that he is available to discharge any responsibilities out here
on the Cartesian coordinate plane. Randy looks up over the Impala and the
retaining wall and the ice clogged xeriscape above that and into the lobby
of Waterhouse House, where Amy Shaftoe has her feet up on a coffee table and
is looking through some of the extremely sad Cayuse related literature that
Randy bought for Avi. She looks down and smiles at him and just barely, he
thinks, restrains the impulse to reach up and twirl one finger around her
ear.
"That's good, Randy!" shouts Uncle Red from the Origin, "now we need to
give it some x!" Meaning that the console is not devoid of economic value
either. Randy does a right face and begins to walk into the (+x, +y)
quadrant, counting the yellow lines. "Give it about four parking spaces!
That's good!" Randy plonks the console down, then pulls a pad of graph paper
out of his coat, whips back the first sheet, which contains the (x,y)
scatterplot of Uncle Geoff and Auntie Anne, and notes down the coordinates
of the console. Sound carries in the Palouse, and from the Origin he can
hear Aunt Nina saying to Uncle Red, "How much of our [tau sub e] have we
just spent on that console?"
"If we leave everything else down here at y equals zero, a hundred
percent after scaling," Uncle Red says. "Otherwise it depends on how we
distribute these things in the y dimension." Which is of course the correct
answer, albeit totally useless.
If these days in Whitman don't make Amy flee from Randy in terror,
nothing will, and so he's glad in a sick way that she is seeing this. The
subject of his family has not really come up until now. Randy is not given
to talking about his family because he feels there is nothing to report:
small town, good education, shame and self esteem doled out in roughly equal
quantities and usually where warranted. Nothing spectacular along the lines
of grotesque psychopathologies, sexual abuse, massive, shocking trauma, or
Satanic rallies in the backyard. So normally when people are talking about
their families, Randy just shuts up and listens, feeling that he has nothing
to say. His familial anecdotes are so tame, so pedestrian, that it would be
presumptuous even to relate them, especially after someone else has just
divulged something really shocking or horrific.
But standing there and looking at these vortices he starts to wonder.
Some people's insistence that "Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty
attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb
up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop" seems kind of overly
deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half witted
surrender to bald teleology. Basically, if everyone has a vested interest in
believing that they understand everything, or even that people are capable
in principle of understanding it (either because believing this dampens
their insecurities about the unpredictable world, or makes them feel more
intelligent than others, or both) then you have an environment in which
dopey, reductionist, simple minded, pat, glib thinking can circulate, like
wheelbarrows filled with inflated currency in the marketplaces of Jakarta.
But things like the ability of some student's dead car to spawn
repeating patterns of thimble sized vortices a hundred yards downwind would
seem to argue in favor of a more cautious view of the world, an openness to
the full and true weirdness of the Universe, an admission of our limited
human faculties. And if you've gotten to this point, then you can argue that
growing up in a family devoid of gigantic and obvious primal psychological
forces, and living a life touched by many subtle and even forgotten
influences rather than one or two biggies (e.g., active participation in the
Church of Satan) can lead, far downwind, to consequences that are not
entirely devoid of interest. Randy hopes, but very much doubts, that America
Shaftoe, sitting up there in the algae colored light reading about the
inadvertent extermination of the Cayuse, sees it this way.
Randy rejoins his aunt at the Origin. Uncle Red has been explaining to
her, somewhat condescendingly, that they must pay careful attention to the
distribution of items on the economic scale, and for his troubles he has
been sent on a long, lonely walk down the +x axis carrying the complete
silver tea service. "Why couldn't we just have stayed inside and worked this
all out on paper?" Aunt Nina asks.
"It was felt that there was value in physically moving this stuff
around, giving people a direct physical analog of the value assertions that
they were making," Randy says. "Also that it would be useful to appraise
this stuff literally in the cold light of day." As opposed to ten or twelve
emotionally fraught people clambering around a packed to the ceiling U Stor
It locker with flashlights, sniping at each other from behind the armoires.
"Once we've all made our choices, then what? You sit down and figure it
out on a spreadsheet, or something?"
"It is much too computationally intensive to be solved that way.
Probably a genetic algorithm is called for certainly there won't be a
mathematically exact solution. My father knows a researcher in Geneva who
has done work on problems isomorphic to this one, and sent him e mail last
night. With any luck we will be able to ftp some suitable software and get
it running on the Tera."
"The Terror?"
"Tera. As in Teraflops."
"That does me no good at all. When you say 'as in' you are supposed to
give me something more familiar to relate it to."
"It is one of the ten fastest computers on the planet. Do you see that
red brick building just to the right of the end of the y axis," Randy says,
pointing down the hill, "Just behind the new gym?"
"The one with all the antennas?"
"Yes. The Tera machine is in there. It was made by a company in
Seattle."
"It must have been very expensive."
"My dad talked them out of it."
"Yes!" says Uncle Red cheerfully, returning from high x value
territory. "The man is a legendary donation raiser."
"He must have a persuasive side to him that I have not been perceptive
enough to notice yet," Aunt Nina says, wandering curiously towards some
large cardboard boxes.
"No," Randy says, "it's more like he just goes in and flops around on
the conference table until they become so embarrassed for his sake that they
agree to sign the check."
"You've seen him do this?" Aunt Nina says skeptically, sizing up a box
labeled CONSTITUENTS OF UPSTAIRS LINEN CLOSET.
"Heard about it. High tech is a small town," Randy says.
"He's been able to make great capital of his father's work," Uncle Red
says. "'If my father had patented even one of his computer inventions,
Palouse College would be bigger than Harvard,' and so on."
Aunt Nina has got the box open now. It is almost completely filled by a
single Qwghlmian blanket, in a dark greyish brown on dark brownish grey
plaid. The blanket in question is about an inch thick, and, during
wintertime family reunions, was infamous as a booby prize of sorts among the
Waterhouse grandchildren. The smell of mothballs, mildew, and heavily oiled
wool causes Aunt Nina's nose to wrinkle, as it did Aunt Annie's before her.
Randy remembers bedding down beneath this blanket once at the age of about
nine, and waking up at two in the morning with bronchial spasms,
hyperthermia, and vague memories of a nightmare about being buried alive.
Aunt Nina slams the box flaps shut, turns around, and looks in the direction
of the Impala. Robin Shaftoe is already running towards them. Being not bad
at math himself, he was quick to pick up on this whole concept, and knows
from experience that the blanket box will have to be trundled deep out into
( x, y) territory.
"I guess I'm just worried," Aunt Nina says, "about having my
preferences mediated by this supercomputer. I have tried to make it clear
what I want. But will the computer understand that?" She has paused by the
CERAMICS box in a way that is tantalizing Randy, who badly wants to have a
look inside, but doesn't want to arouse suspicions. He's the referee and is
sworn to objectivity. "Forget the china," she says, "too old ladyish."
Uncle Red wanders over and disappears behind one of the dead cars,
presumably to take a leak. Aunt Nina says, "How about you, Randy? As the
eldest son of the eldest son, you must have some feelings about this."
"No doubt when my parents' time comes, they will pass on some of
Grandma and Grandpa's legacy to me," Randy says.
"Oh, very circumspect. Well done," Aunt Nina says. "But as the only
grandchild who has any memories of your grandfather at all, there must be
something here that you might like to have."
"There'll probably be some odds and ends that nobody wants," Randy
says. Then like an almost perfect moron like an organism genetically
engineered to be a total, stupid idiot Randy glances directly at the Trunk.
Then he tries to hide it, which only makes it more conspicuous. He guesses
that his mostly beardless face must be an open book, and wishes he had never
shaved. A bullet of ice strikes him in the right cornea with a nearly
audible splot. The ballistic impact blinds him and the thermal shock gives
him an ice cream headache. When he recovers enough to see again, Aunt Nina
is walking around the trunk, kind of spiraling in towards it in a rapidly
decaying orbit. "Hmm. What's in here?" She grips the handle at one end and
finds she can barely get it off the ground.
"Old Japanese code books. Bundles of ETC cards."
"Marcus?"
"Yes, ma'am!" says Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe, returning from the double
negative quadrant.
"What is the angle exactly in between the +x and +y axes?" Aunt Nina
asks. "I would ask the referee, here, but I'm beginning to have doubts about
his objectivity."
M.A. glances at Randy and decides he had best interpret this last
comment as good natured familial horsing around. "Would you like that in
radians or degrees, ma'am?"
"Neither. Just demonstrate it for me. Take this great big trunk on that
strong back of yours and just split the middle between +x and +y axes and
keep walking until I say when."
"Yes, ma'am. M.A. hefts the trunk and starts walking, frequently
looking back and forth to verify that he's exactly in the middle. Robin
stands off at a safe distance watching with interest.
Uncle Red, returning from his piss break, watches this in horror.
"Nina! Love! That's not worth the cost of shipping it home! What on earth
are you doing?"
"Making sure I get what I want," Nina says.
***
Randy gets a small part of what he wants two hours later, when his own
mother breaks the seal on the CERAMICS box to verify that the china is in
good condition. At the time, Randy and his father are standing next to the
Trunk. It is rather late in his parent's value plotting work and so pieces
of fine furniture are now widely scattered across the parking lot, looking
like the aftermath of one of those tornadoes that miraculously sets things
down intact after whirling them through the skies for ten miles. Randy is
trying to find a way to talk up the emotional value of this trunk without
violating his oath of objectivity. The chances of anyone other than Nina
ending up with this trunk are actually quite miserable, since she (to Red's
horror) left almost everything clumped around the Origin except for it and
the coveted Console. But if Dad would at least move the thing off dead
center which no one except Nina has done then, if the Tera awards it to him
tomorrow morning, Randy can plausibly argue that it's something other than a
computer error. But Dad is taking most of his cues from Mom and is having
none of it.
Mom has bitten her gloves off and is parting layer after layer of
crumpled newsprint with magenta hands. "Oh, the gravy boat!" she exclaims,
and hoists up something that is more of a heavy cruiser than a boat. Randy
agrees with Aunt Nina that the design is old ladyish in the extreme, but
that's kind of tautological since he has only seen it in the house of his
grandmother, who has been an old lady for as long as he has known her. Randy
walks towards his mother with his hands in his pockets, still trying to play
it cool for some reason. This obsession with secrecy may have gone a bit
far. He has seen this gravy boat maybe twenty times in his life, always at
family reunions, and seeing it now roils up a whole silt cloud of long
settled emotions. He reaches out, and Mom remits it to his mittened hands.
He pretends to admire it from the side, and then flips it over to read the
words glazed on the bottom.
ROYAL ALBERT LAVENDER ROSE.
For a moment he is sweating under a vertical sun, swaying to keep his
balance on a rocking boat, smelling the neoprene of hoses and flippers. Then
he's back in the Palouse. He begins thinking about how to sabotage the
computer program to ensure that Aunt Nina gets what she wants, so that
she'll give him what is rightfully his.
Chapter 71 GOLGOTHA
Lieutenant Ninomiya reaches Bundok about two weeks after Goto Dengo,
accompanied by several bashed and scraped wooden cases. "What is your
specialty?" asks Goto Dengo, and Lieutenant Ninomiya responds by opening up
one of the cases to reveal a surveyor's transit swaddled in clean, oiled
linen. Another case contains an equally perfect sextant. Goto Dengo gawks.
The gleaming perfection of the instruments is a marvel. But even more
marvelous is that they sent him a surveyor only twelve days after he
requested one. Ninomiya grins at the look on his new colleague's face,
revealing that he has lost all of his front teeth except for one, which
happens to be mostly gold.
Before any engineering can be done, all of this wilderness must be
brought into the realm of the known. Detailed maps must be prepared,
watersheds charted, soil sampled. For two weeks Goto Dengo has been going
around with a pipe and a sledgehammer taking core samples of the dirt. He
has identified rocks from the streambeds, estimated the flow rates of the
Yamamoto and Tojo Rivers, counted and catalogued trees. He has trudged
through the jungle and planted flags around the approximate boundaries of
the Special Security Zone. The whole time, he's been worrying about having
to perform the survey himself, using primitive, improvised tools. And all of
a sudden, here is Lieutenant Ninomiya with his instruments.
The three Lieutenants, Goto, Mori and Ninomiya, spend a few days
surveying the flat, semi open land straddling the lower Tojo River. The
year, 1944, is turning out to be dry so far, and Mori does not want to
construct his military barracks on land that will turn into a marsh after
the first big rain. He is not concerned about the comfort of the prisoners,
but he would at least like to ensure that they won't get washed away. The
lay of the land is also important in setting up the interlocking fields of
fire that will be necessary to put down any riots or mass escape attempts.
They put Bundok's few enlisted men to work gathering bamboo stakes, then
drive these in to mark the locations of roads, barracks, barbed wire fences,
guard towers, and a few carefully sited mortar emplacements from which the
guards will be able to fill the atmosphere in any chosen part of the camp
with shrapnel.
When Lieutenant Goto takes Lieutenant Ninomiya up into the jungle,
clambering up the steep valley of the Tojo, Lieutenant Mori must stay behind
in accordance with Captain Noda's orders. This is just as well, since Mori
has his work cut out for him down below. The captain has granted Ninomiya a
special dispensation to see the Special Security Zone.
"Elevations are of supreme importance in this project," Goto Dengo
tells the surveyor on the way up. They are burdened with surveying equipment
and fresh water, but Ninomiya clambers up the rocky gulch of the half
parched river just as ably as Goto Dengo himself. "We will begin by
establishing the level of Lake Yamamoto which does not exist yet and then
work downwards from there."
"I have also been ordered to obtain the precise latitude and
longitude," says Ninomiya.
Goto Dengo grins. "That's hard there is nowhere to see the sun."
"What about the three peaks?"
Goto Dengo turns to see if Ninomiya is joking. But the surveyor is
looking intently up the valley.
"Your dedication sets a good example," Goto Dengo says.
"This place is paradise compared to Rabaul."
"Is that where you were sent from?"
"Yes."
"How did you escape? It is cut off, isn't it?"
"It has been cut off for some time," Ninomiya says curtly. Then, he
adds: "They came and got me in a submarine." His voice is husky and faint.
Goto Dengo is silent for a while.
Ninomiya has a system all worked out in his head, which they put into
effect the next week, after they have done a rough survey of the Special
Security Zone. Early in the morning, they hoist an enlisted man into a tree
with a canteen, a watch, and a mirror. There is nothing special about this
tree except for a bamboo stake recently driven into the ground nearby,
labeled MAIN DRIFT.
Then Lieutenants Ninomiya and Goto climb to the top of the mountain,
which takes them about eight hours. It is dreadfully arduous, and Ninomiya
is shocked that Goto volunteers to go with him. "I want to see this place
from the top of Calvary," Goto Dengo explains. "Only then will I have the
insight to perform my duty well."
On the way up, they compare notes, New Guinea vs. New Britain. It seems
that the latter's only saving grace is the settlement of Rabaul, a formerly
British port complete with a cricket oval, now the linchpin of Nipponese
forces in Southwest Asia. "For a long time it was a great place to be a
surveyor," Ninomiya says, and describes the fortifications that they built
there in preparation for MacArthur's invasion. He has a draftsman's
enthusiasm for detail and at one point talks nonstop for an hour describing
a particular system of bunkers and pillboxes down to the last booby trap and
glory hole.
As the climb gets harder, the two vie with each other in belittling its
difficulty. Goto Dengo tells the tale of climbing over the snow covered
mountain range in New Guinea.
"Nowadays, on New Britain we climb volcanoes all the time," Ninomiya
says offhandedly.
"Why?"
"To collect sulfur."
"Sulfur? Why?"
"To make gunpowder."
After this they don't talk for a while.
Goto Dengo tries to dig them out of a conversational hole. "It'll be a
bad day for MacArthur when he tries to take Rabaul!"
Ninomiya trudges along silently for a bit, trying to control himself,
and fails. "You idiot," he says, "don't you see? MacArthur isn't coming.
There's no need."
"But Rabaul is the cornerstone of the whole theater!"
"It is a cornerstone of soft, sweet wood in a universe of termites,"
Ninomiya snaps. "All he has to do is ignore us for another year, and then
everyone will be dead of starvation or typhus."
The jungle thins out. The plants are wrestling for footholds on a loose
slope of volcanic cinders, and only smaller ones endure. This puts Goto
Dengo in the mind of writing a poem in which the small, tenacious Nipponese
prevail over the big, lumbering Americans, but it has been a long time since
he wrote a poem and he can't make the words go together.
Someday the plants will turn this cone of scoria and rubble into soil,
but not yet. Now that Goto Dengo can finally see for more than a few yards
he is beginning to understand the lay of the land. The numerical data that
he and Ninomiya have compiled over the last week is being synthesized,
within his mind, into a solid understanding of how this place works.
Calvary is an old cinder cone. It started as a fissure from which ash
and scoria were ejected, one fragment at a time, for thousands of years,
tumbling up and outwards in a family of mortar shell like parabolic curves,
varying in height and distance depending on the size of each fragment and
the direction of the wind. They landed in a wide ring centered on the
fissure. As the ring grew in height it naturally spread out into a broad,
truncated cone with a central pit gouged out of its top, with the spitting
fissure in the bottom of that pit.
The winds here tend to come from a little bit east of due south, and so
the ash tended to be pushed towards the north by northwest edge of the
cone's rim. That is still the highest point of the cinder cone. But the
fissure died out eons ago, or perhaps was plugged by its own emissions, and
the whole structure has been much eroded since then. The southern rim of the
cone is just a barrier of low hills perforated by the courses of the
Yamamoto River and the two tributaries that come together to form the Tojo
River. The central pit is a bowl of loathsome jungle, so saturated with
chlorophyll that it looks black from above. Birds cruise above the canopy,
looking like colored stars from up here.
The northern rim still rises a good five hundred meters above the bowl
of jungle, but its formerly smooth arc has been dissected by erosion to form
three distinct summits, each one a pile of red scoria half concealed by a
stubble of green vegetation. Without discussion, Ninomiya and Goto Dengo
head for the one in the middle, which is the highest. They reach it at about
two thirty in the afternoon, and immediately wish they hadn't because the
sun is beating almost straight down on top of them. But there is a cool
breeze up here, and once they have protected their heads with makeshift
burnooses, it's not so bad. Goto Dengo sets up the tripod and the transit
while Ninomiya uses his sextant to shoot the sun. He has a pretty good
German watch which he zeroed against the radio transmission from Manila this
morning, and this enables him to reckon the longitude. He works the
calculation out on a scrap of paper on his lap, then goes back and does it
again to double check the numbers, speaking them out loud. Goto Dengo copies
them down in his notebook, just in case Ninomiya's notes get lost.
At three o'clock sharp, the enlisted man down in the tree begins to
flash his mirror at them: a brilliant spark from a dark rug of jungle that
is otherwise featureless. Ninomiya centers his transit on this signal and
takes down more figures. In combination with various other data from maps,
aerial photos and the like, this should enable him to make an estimate of
the main shaft's latitude and longitude.
"I don't know how accurate this will be," he frets, as they trudge down
the mountain. "I have the peak exactly what did you call it? Cavalry?"
"Close enough."
"This means soldiers on horseback, correct?"
"Yes."
"But the site of the shaft I will not have very precisely unless I can
use better techniques."
Goto Dengo considers telling him that this is perfectly all right, that
the place was made to be lost and forgotten. But he keeps his mouth shut.
The survey work takes another couple of weeks. They figure out where
the shore of Lake Yamamoto will be and calculate its volume. It will be more
of a pond than a lake less than a hundred meters across but it will be
deceptively deep, and it will hold a lot of water. They calculate the angle
of the shaft that will connect the bottom of the lake to the main network of
tunnels. They figure out where all of the horizontal tunnels will emerge
from the walls of the Tojo River's gorge, and stake out the routes of roads
and railways that will lead to those openings, so that debris can be removed
and precious war material brought in for storage. They double– and
triple check all of it to make sure that no fragment of the works will be
visible from the air.
Meanwhile, down below, Lieutenant Mori and a small work detail have
planted some fenceposts and strung some barbed wire just enough to contain a
hundred or so prisoners, who arrive packed into a couple of military trucks.
When these are put to work, the camp expands very rapidly; the military
barracks go up in a few days and the double barbed wire perimeter is
completed. They never seem to lack for supplies here. Dynamite comes in by
the truckload, as if it weren't desperately needed in places like Rabaul,
and is carefully stored under the supervision of Goto Dengo. Prisoners carry
it into a special shed that has been constructed for this purpose in the
shade of the jungle. Goto Dengo has not been close to the prisoners before,
and is startled to realize that they are all Chinese. And they are not
speaking the dialect of Canton or of Formosa, but rather one that Goto Dengo
heard frequently when he was posted in Shanghai. These prisoners are
northern Chinese.
It is stranger and stranger all the time, this Bundok place.
The Filipinos, he knows, have been uniquely surly about their inclusion
in the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere. They are well armed, and
MacArthur has been egging them on. Many thousands of them have been taken
prisoner. Within half a day's drive of Bundok there are more than enough
Filipino prisoners to fill Lieutenant Mori's camp and accomplish Lieutenant
Goto's project. And yet the powers that be have shipped hundreds of Chinese
people all the way down from Shanghai to do this work.
At times like this he begins to doubt his own sanity. He feels an urge
to discuss the matter with Lieutenant Ninomiya. But the surveyor, his friend
and confidant, has made himself scarce since his work was completed. One
day, Goto Dengo goes by Ninomiya's tent and finds it empty. Captain Noda
explains that the surveyor was called away suddenly to perform important
work elsewhere.
About a month later, when the road building work in the Special
Security Zone is well underway, some of the Chinese workers who are digging
begin shouting excitedly. Goto Dengo understands what they are saying.
They have uncovered human remains. The jungle has done its work and
practically nothing is left but bones, but the smell, and the legions of
ants, tell him that the corpse is a fairly recent one. He grabs a shovel
from one of the workers and pulls up a scoop of dirt and carries it over to
the river, dripping tangles of ants. He lowers it carefully into the running
water. The dirt dissolves into a brown trail in the river and the skull is
soon revealed: the dome of the head, the eye sockets still not entirely
empty, the nasal bone with some fragments of cartilage still attached, and
finally the jaws, pocked with old abcesses and missing most of their teeth,
except for one gold tooth in the middle. The current turns the skull over
slowly, as if Lieutenant Ninomiya is hiding his face in shame, and Goto
Dengo sees a neat hole punched through the base of the skull.
He looks up. A dozen Chinese are gathered above him on the riverbank,
watching him impassively.
"Do not speak of this to any of the other Nipponese," Goto Dengo says.
Their eyes go wide and their lips part in astonishment as they hear him
speaking the precise dialect of Shanghai prostitutes.
One of the Chinese workers is nearly bald. He seems to be in his
forties, though prisoners age rapidly and so it is always difficult to tell.
He is not scared like the others. He is looking at Goto Dengo appraisingly.
"You," Goto Dengo says, "pick two other men and follow me. Bring
shovels."
He leads them into the jungle, into a place where he knows there will
be no further digging, and shows them where to put Lieutenant Ninomiya's new
grave. The bald man is a good leader as well as a strong worker and he gets
the grave dug quickly, then transfers the remains without squeamishness or
complaint. If he has been through the China Incident and survived for this
long as a prisoner of war, he has probably seen and done much worse.
Goto Dengo does his part by distracting Captain Noda for a couple of
hours. They go up and tour the dam work on the Yamamoto River. Noda is
anxious to create Lake Yamamoto as soon as possible, before MacArthur's air
force makes detailed surveys of the area. The sudden appearance of a lake in
the jungle would probably not go unnoticed.
The site of the lake is a natural rock bowl, covered by jungle, with
the Yamamoto River running through the middle of it. Right next to the
riverbank, men are already at work with rock drills, placing dynamite
charges. "The inclined shaft will start here," Goto Dengo tells Captain
Noda, "and runs straight " turning his back on the river he makes one hand
into a blade and thrusts it into the jungle " straight down to Golgotha."
The Place of the Skull.
"Gargotta?" Captain Noda says.
"It is a Tagalog word," Goto Dengo says authoritatively. "It means
'hidden glade.' "
"Hidden glade. I like it! Very good. Gargotta!" Captain Noda says.
"Your work is proceeding very well, Lieutenant Goto."
"I am only striving to live up to the high standard that was set by
Lieutenant Ninomiya," says Goto Dengo.
"He was an excellent worker," Noda says evenly.
"Perhaps when I am finished here, I can follow him to wherever he was
sent."
Noda grins. "Your work is only beginning. But I can say with confidence
that when you are finished you will be reunited with your friend."
Chapter 72 SEATTLE
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's widow and five children agree that Dad
did something in the war, and that's about all. Each of them seems to have a
different 1950s B movie, or 1940s Movietone newsreel, in his or her head,
portraying a rather different set of events. There is not even agreement on
whether he was in the Army or the Navy, which seems like a pretty
fundamental plot point to Randy. Was he in Europe or Asia? Opinions differ.
Grandma grew up on an Outback sheep farm. One might therefore think that, at
some point in her life, she might have been an earthy cuss the type of woman
who would not only remember which service her late husband had been in but
would be able to take down his rifle from the attic and field strip it
blindfolded. But she had evidently spent something like seventy five percent
of her waking hours in church (where she not only worshipped but went to
school and transacted essentially all of her social life), or in transit
thereto or therefrom, and her own parents quite explicitly did not want her
to wind up living on a farm, ramming her arm up livestock vaginas and
slapping raw steaks over the black eyes dished out by some husband. Farming
might have been an adequate sort of booby prize for one or at most two of
their sons, sort of a fallback for any offspring who happened to suffer
major head injuries or fall into chronic alcoholism. But the real purpose of
the cCmndhd kids was to restore the past and lost glories of the family, who
allegedly had been major wool brokers around the time of Shakespeare and
well on their way to living in Kensington and spelling their name Smith
before some combination of scrapie, long term climatic change, nefarious
conduct by jealous Outer Qwghlmians, and a worldwide shift in fashions away
from funny smelling thirty pound sweaters with small arthropods living in
them had driven them all into honest poverty and then not so honest poverty
and led to their forcible transportation to Australia.
The point here being that Grandma was incarnated, indoctrinated, and
groomed by her Ma to wear stockings and lipstick and gloves in a big city
somewhere. The experiment had succeeded to the point where Mary cCmndhd
could, at any point in her post adolescent life, have prepared and served
high tea to the Queen of England on ten minutes' notice, flawlessly, without
having to even glance in a mirror, straighten up her dwelling, polish any
silver, or bone up on any etiquette. It had been a standing joke among her
male offspring that Mom could walk unescorted into any biker bar in the
world and simply by her bearing and appearance cause all ongoing fistfights
to be instantly suspended, all grubby elbows to be removed from the bar,
postures to straighten, salty language to be choked off. The bikers would
climb over one another's backs to take her coat, pull her chair back,
address her as ma'am, etc. Though it had never been performed, this biker
bar scene was like a whole sort of virtual or notional comedy sketch that
was a famous moment in entertainment for the Waterhouse family, like the
Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Belushi doing his samurai bit on Saturday Night
Live. It was up there on their mental videocassette shelves right next to
their imaginary newsreels and B movies of what the Patriarch had done in the
war.
The bottom line was that the ability to run a house in the way Grandma
was legendary or infamous for doing, to keep the personal grooming up to
that standard, to send out a few hundred Christmas cards every year, each
written in flawless fountain pen longhand, etc., etc., that all of these
things taken together took up as much space in her brain as, say mathematics
might take up in a theoretical physicist's.
And so when it came to anything of a practical nature she was perfectly
helpless, and probably always had been. Until she had gotten too old to
drive, she had continued to tool around Whitman in the 1965 Lincoln
Continental, which was the last vehicle her husband had purchased, from
Whitman's Patterson Lincoln Mercury, before his untimely death. The vehicle
weighed something like six thousand pounds and had more moving parts than a
silo full of Swiss watches. Whenever any of her offspring came to visit,
someone would discreetly slip out to the garage to yank the dipstick, which
would always be mysteriously topped up with clear amber colored 10W40. It
eventually turned out that her late husband had summoned the entire living
male lineage of the Patterson family four generations of them into his
hospital room and gathered them around his deathbed and wrought some kind of
unspecified pact with them along the general lines of that, if at any point
in the future, the tire pressure in the Lincoln dropped below spec or the
maintenance in any other way lapsed, all of the Pattersons would not merely
sacrifice their immortal souls, but literally be pulled out of meetings or
lavatories and dragged off to hell on the spot, like Marlowe's Dr. Faustus.
He knew that his wife had only the vaguest idea of what a tire was, other
than something that from time to time a man would heroically jump out of the
car and change while she sat inside the car admiring him. The world of
physical objects seemed to have been made solely for the purpose of giving
the men around Grandma something to do with their hands; and not, mind you,
for any practical reason, but purely so that Grandma could twiddle those
men's emotional knobs by reacting to how well or poorly they did it. Which
was a fine setup as long as men were actually around, but not so good after
Grandpa died. So guerilla mechanic teams had been surveilling Randy's
grandmother ever since and occasionally swiping her Lincoln from the church
parking lot on Sunday mornings and taking it down to Patterson's for sub
rosa oil changes. The ability of the Lincoln to run flawlessly for a quarter
of a century without maintenance without even putting gasoline in the tank
had only confirmed Grandmother's opinions about the amusing superfluity of
male pursuits.
In any event, what it all came down to was that Grandma, whose grasp of
practical matters had only declined (if that was even possible) with
advanced age, was not the sort of person you would go to for information
about her late husband's war record. Defeating the Nazis was in the same
category as changing a flat tire: an untidy business that men were expected
to know how to do. And not just the men of yore, the supermen of her
generation; Randy was expected to know about these things too. If the Axis
reconstituted itself tomorrow, Grandma would expect Randy to be suited up
behind the controls of a supersonic fighter plane the day after that. And
Randy would sooner spiral into the ground at Mach 2 than bear her tidings
that he wasn't up to the job.
Luckily for Randy, who has recently become intensely curious about
Grandpa, an old suitcase has been unearthed. It's a rattan and leather
thing, sort of a snappy Roaring Twenties number complete with some badly
abraded hotel stickers plotting Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse's migration
from the Midwest to Princeton and back which is completely filled with small
black and white photographs. Randy's father dumps the contents out on a ping
pong table that inexplicably sits in the center of the rec room at Grandma's
managed care facility, whose residents are about as likely to play ping pong
as they are to get their nipples pierced. The photos are messed out into
several discrete piles which are in turn sorted through by Randy and his
father and his aunts and uncles. Most of them are photos of the Waterhouse
kids, so everyone's fascinated until they have found pictures of themselves
at a couple of different ages. Then the pile of photos begins to look
depressingly large. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse was evidently a shutterbug
of sorts and now his offspring are paying the price.
Randy has a different set of motives, and so he stays there late, going
through pictures by himself. Ninety nine out of a hundred are snapshots of
Waterhouse brats from the 1950s. But some are older. He finds a photo of
Grandpa in a place with palm trees, in a military uniform, with a big white
disk shaped officer's cap on his head. Three hours later he comes across a
picture of a very young Grandpa, really just a turkey necked adolescent
costumed in grownup clothes, standing in front of a gothic building with two
other men: a grinning dark haired chap who looks vaguely familiar, and an
aquiline blond fellow in rimless glasses. All three men have bicycles;
Grandpa is straddling his, and the other two, perhaps considering this to be
not so dignified, are supporting theirs with their hands. Another hour goes
by, and then there's Grandpa in a khaki uniform with more palm trees in the
background.
The next morning he sits down next to his grandmother, after she has
finished her daily hourlong getting out of bed ritual. "Grandmother, I found
these two old photographs." He deals them out on the table in front of her
and gives her a few moments to switch contexts. Grandma doesn't turn on a
dime conversationally, and besides, those stiff old lady corneas take a
little while to shift focus.
"Yes, these are both Lawrence when he was in the service." Grandmother
has always had this knack for telling people the obvious in a way that is
scrupulously polite but that makes the recipient feel like a butthead for
having wasted her time. By this point she is obviously tired of IDing
photographs, a tedious job with an obvious subtext of "you're going to die
soon and we were curious who is this lady standing next to the Buick?"
"Grandmother," Randy says brightly, trying to rouse her interest, "in
this photo here, he is wearing a Navy uniform. And in this photo here, he is
wearing an Army uniform."
Grandma Waterhouse raises her eyebrows and looks at him with the
synthetic interest she would use if she were at a formal affair of some
kind, and some man she'd just met tried to give her a tutorial on tire
changing.
"It is, uh, I think, kind of unusual," Randy says, "for a man to be in
both the Army and the Navy during the same war. Usually it's one or the
other."
"Lawrence had both an Army uniform and a Navy uniform," Grandmother
says, in the same tone she'd used to say he had both a small intestine and a
large intestine, "and he would wear whichever one was appropriate."
"Of course he would," Randy says.
***
The laminar wind is gliding over the highway like a crisp sheet being
stripped from a bed, and Randy's finding it hard to keep the Acura on the
pavement. The wind isn't strong enough to blow the car around, but it
obscures the edges of the road; all he can see is this white, striated plane
sliding laterally beneath him. His eye tells him to steer into it, which
would be a bad idea since it would take him and Amy straight into the lava
fields. He tries to focus on a distant point: the white diamond of Mount
Rainier, a couple of hundred kilometers west.
"I don't even know when they got married," Randy says. "Isn't that
horrible?"
"September of 1945," Amy says. "I dragged it out of her."
"Wow."
"Girl talk."
"I didn't know you were even rigged for girl talk."
"We can all do it."
"Did you learn anything else about the wedding? Like "
"The china pattern?"
"Yeah."
"It was in fact Lavender Rose," Amy says.
"So it fits. I mean, it fits chronologically. The submarine went down
in May of 1945 off of Palawan four months before the wedding. Knowing my
grandmother, wedding preparations would have been well advanced by that
point they definitely would have settled on a china pattern."
"And you think you have a photo of your grandpa in Manila around that
time?"
"It's definitely Manila. And Manila wasn't liberated until March of
'45."
"So what do we have, then? Your grandpa must've had some kind of
connection with someone on that U boat, between March and May."
"A pair of eyeglasses was found on the U boat." Randy pulls a photo out
of his shirt pocket and hands it across to Amy. "I'd be interested to know
if they match the specs on that guy. The tall blond."
"I can check it out when I go back. Is the geek on the left your
grandpa?"
"Yeah."
"Who's the geek in the middle?"
"I think it's Turing."
"Turing, as in TURING Magazine?"
"They named the magazine after him because he did a lot of early work
with computers," Randy says.
"Like your grandpa did."
"Yeah."
"How about this guy we're going to see in Seattle? He's a computer guy
too? Ooh, you're getting this look on your face like 'Amy just said
something so stupid it caused me physical pain.' Is this a common facial
expression among the men of your family? Do you think it is the expression
that your grandfather wore when your grandmother came home and announced
that she had backed the Lincoln Continental into a fire hydrant?"
"I am sorry if I make you feel bad sometimes," Randy says. "The family
is full of scientists. Mathematicians. The least intelligent of us become
engineers. Which is sort of what I am."
"Excuse me, did you just say you were one of the least intelligent?"
"Least focused, maybe."
"My point is that precision, and getting things right, in the
mathematical sense, is the one thing we have going for us. Everyone has to
have a way of getting ahead, right? Otherwise you end up working at
McDonald's your whole life, or worse. Some are born rich. Some are born into
a big family like yours. We make our way in the world by knowing that two
plus two equals four, and sticking to our guns in a way that is kind of
nerdy and that maybe hurts people's feelings sometimes. I'm sorry."
"Hurts whose feelings? People who think that two plus two equals five?"
"People who put a higher priority on social graces than on having every
statement uttered in a conversation be literally true."
"Like, for example . . . female people?"
Randy grinds his teeth for about a mile, and then says, "If there is
any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how
women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this
incredibly narrow laser beam focus on one tiny little subject and think
about nothing else."
"Whereas women can't?"
"I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I'm
characterizing here, as the female approach, is essentially saner and
healthier.
"See, you are being a little paranoid here and focusing on the negative
too much. It's not about how women are deficient. It's more about how men
are deficient. Our social deficiencies, lack of perspective, or whatever you
want to call it, is what enables us to study one species of dragonfly for
twenty years, or sit in front of a computer for a hundred hours a week
writing code. This is not the behavior of a well balanced and healthy
person, but it can obviously lead to great advances in synthetic fibers. Or
whatever."
"But you said that you yourself were not very focused."
"Compared to other men in my family, that's true. So, I know a little
about astronomy, a lot about computers, a little about business, and I have,
if I may say so, a slightly higher level of social functioning than the
others. Or maybe it's not even functioning, just an acute awareness of when
I'm not functioning, so that I at least know when to feel embarrassed."
Amy laughs. "You're definitely good at that. It seems like you sort of
lurch from one moment of feeling embarrassed to the next."
Randy gets embarrassed.
"It's fun to watch," Amy says encouragingly. "It speaks well of you."
"What I'm saying is that this does set me apart. One of the most
frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he's
socially inept because everybody's been there but rather his complete lack
of embarrassment about it."
"Which is still kind of pathetic."
"It was pathetic when they were in high school," Randy says. "Now it's
something else. Something very different from pathetic."
"What, then?"
"I don't know. There is no word for it. You'll see."
***
Driving over the Cascades produces a climatic transition that would
normally require a four hour airplane flight. Warm rain spatters the wind
shield and loosens the rinds of ice on the wipers. The gradual surprises of
March and April are compressed into a terse executive summary. It is about
as tantalizing as a strip tease video played on fast forward. The landscape
turns wet, and so green it's almost blue, and bolts straight up out of the
soil in the space of about a mile. The fast lanes of Interstate 90 are
strewn with brown snow turds melted loose from homebound skiers' Broncos.
Semis plummet past them in writhing conical shrouds of water and steam.
Randy's startled to see new office buildings halfway up the foothills,
sporting high tech logos. Then he wonders why he's startled. Amy has never
been here, and she takes her feet down from the airbag deployment panel and
sits up straight to look, wishing out loud that Robin and Marcus Aurelius
had come along, instead of turning back towards Tennessee. Randy remembers
to glide over into the right lanes and slow down as they shed the last
thousand feet of altitude into Issaquah, and sure enough the highway patrol
is out there ticketing speeders. Amy's duly impressed by this display of
acumen. They are still miles outside of the city core, in the half forested
suburbs of the East Side, where street and avenue numbers are up in the
triple digits, when Randy pulls onto an exit ramp and drives them down a
long commercial strip that turns out to be just the sphere of influence of a
big mall. Several satellite malls have burst from the asphalt all around it,
wiping out old landmarks and screwing up Randy's navigation. Everything is
crowded because people are out returning their Christmas gifts. After a
little bit of driving around and cursing, Randy finds the core mall, which
looks a little shabby compared to its satellites. He parks in the far corner
of the lot, explaining that it is more logical to do this and then walk for
fifteen seconds than it is to spend fifteen minutes looking for a closer
space.
Randy and Amy stand behind the Acura's open trunk for a minute peeling
off layers of suddenly gratuitous Eastern Washington insulation. Amy frets
about her cousins and wishes that she and Randy had donated all of their
cold weather gear to them; when last seen they were circling the Impala like
a pair of carrier based fighter aircraft orbiting their mother ship in
preparation for landing, checking tire pressures and fluid levels with an
intensity, an alertness, that made it seem as if they were about to do
something much more exciting than settle their asses into bucket seats and
drive east for a couple of days. They have a gallant style about them that
must knock the girls dead back home. Amy hugged them both passionately, as
if she'd never see them again, and they accepted her hugs with dignity and
forbearance, and then they were gone; resisting the urge to lay a patch
until they were a couple of blocks distant.
They go into the mall, Amy still wondering aloud why they are here, but
game. Randy is a little bit turned around, but eventually homes in on a
dimly heard electronic cacophony digitized voices prophesying war and
emerges into the mall's food court. Navigating now partly by sound and
partly by smell, he comes to the corner where a lot of males, ranging from
perhaps ten to forty years old, are seated in small clusters, some
extracting quivering chopstick loads of Szechuan from little white boxes but
most fixated on what, from a distance, looks like some kind of paperwork. As
backdrop, the ultraviolet maw of a vast game arcade spews digitized and
sound lab sweetened detonations, whooshes, sonic booms and Gatling farts.
But the arcade seems nothing more than a defunct landmark around which has
gathered this intense cult of paperwork hobbyists. A wiry teenager in tight
black jeans and a black t shirt prowls among the tables with the provocative
confidence of a pool hustler, a long skinny cardboard box slung over his
shoulder like a rifle. "These are my ethnic group," Randy explains in
response to the look on Amy's face. "Fantasy role playing gamers. This is
Avi and me ten years ago.
"They look like they're playing cards." Amy looks again, and wrinkles
her nose. "Weird cards." Amy barges curiously into the middle of a four nerd
game. Almost anywhere else, the appearance of a female with discernible
waist among these guys would cause some kind of a stir. Their eyes would at
least travel rudely up and down her body. But these guys only think about
one thing: the cards in their hands, each contained in a clear plastic
sleeve to keep it mint condition, each decorated with a picture of a troll
or wizard or some other leaf on the post Tolkienian evolutionary tree, and
printed on the back with elaborate rules. Mentally, these guys are not in a
mall on the East Side of greater Seattle. They are on a mountain pass trying
to kill each other with edged weapons and numinous fire.
The young hustler is sizing Randy up as a potential customer. His box
is long enough to contain a few hundred cards, and it looks heavy. Randy
would not be surprised to learn something depressing about this kid, like
that he makes so much money from buying cards low and selling them high that
he owns a brand new Lexus he's too young to drive. Randy catches his eye and
asks, "Chester?"
"Bathroom."
Randy sits down and watches Amy watching the nerds play their game. He
thought he'd hit bottom in Whitman, out there on the parking lot, that
surely she would get scared and flee. But this is potentially worse. A bunch
of tubby guys who never go outside, working themselves into a frenzy over
elaborate games in which nonexistent characters go out and do pretend things
that mostly are not as interesting as what Amy, her father, and various
other members of her family do all the time without making any fuss about
it. It is almost like Randy is deliberately hammering away at Amy trying to
find out when she'll break and run. But her lip hasn't started to writhe
nauseously yet. She's watching the game impartially, peeking over the nerds'
shoulders, following the action, occasionally squinting at some abstraction
in the rules.
"Hey, Randy."
"Hey, Chester."
So Chester's back from the bathroom. He looks exactly like the Chester
of old, except spread out over a somewhat larger volume, like the classic
demo of the expanding universe theory in which a face, or some other figure,
is drawn on a partly inflated balloon which is then inflated some more. The
pores have gotten larger, and the individual shafts of hair farther apart,
which produces an illusion of impending baldness. It seems like even his
eyes have gotten farther apart and the flecks of color in the irises grown
into blotches. He is not necessarily fat he has the same rumpled heftiness
he used to. Since people do not literally grow after their late teens, this
must be an illusion. Older people seem to take up a larger space in the
room. Or maybe older people see more.
"How's Avid?"
"As avid as ever," Randy says, which is lame but obligatory. Chester is
wearing a sort of photographer's vest with a gratuitous number of small
pockets, each of which is stuffed with gaming cards. Maybe that's why he
seems big. He has like twenty pounds of cards strapped to him. "I note that
you have made the transition to card based RPGs," Randy says.
"Oh, yeah! It is so much better than the old pencil and paper way. Or
even computer mediated RPGs, with all due respect to the fine work that you
and Avi did. What are you working on now?"
"Something that might actually be relevant to this," Randy says. "I was
just realizing that if you have a set of cryptographic protocols suitable
for issuing an electronic currency that cannot be counterfeited which oddly
enough we do you could adapt those same protocols to card games. Because
each one of these cards is like a banknote. Some more valuable than others."
Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt
Randy as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when
someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads
into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the
information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self confidence,
and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And
highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative
sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the
social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed
as aggression under any circumstances. "It's already being done," Chester
says, when Randy's finished. "In fact, that company you and Avi worked for
in Minneapolis is one of the leaders "
"I'd like you to meet my friend, Amy," Randy interrupts, even though
Amy is a good distance away, and not paying attention. But Randy is afraid
that Chester's about to tell him that stock in that Minneapolis company is
now up to the point where its market capitalization exceeds that of General
Dynamics, and that Randy should've held onto his shares. "Amy, this is my
friend Chester," Randy says, leading Chester between tables. At this point
some of the gamers actually do look up interestedly not at Amy, but at
Chester, who (Randy infers) has probably got some one of a kind cards tucked
away in that vest, like THE THERMONUCLEAR ARSENAL OF THE UNION OF SOVIET
SOCIALIST REPUBLICS or YHWH. Chester exhibits a marked improvement in social
skills, shaking Amy's hand with no trace of awkwardness and dropping
smoothly into a pretty decent imitation of a mature and well rounded
individual engaging in polite small talk. Before Randy knows it, Chester has
invited them over to his house.
"I heard it wasn't done yet," Randy says.
"You must've seen the article in The Economist," Chester says.
"That's right."
"If you'd seen the article in The New York Times, you'd know that the
article in The Economist was wrong. I am now living in the house."
"Well, it'd be fun to see it," Randy says.
***
"Notice how well paved my street is?" Chester says sourly, half an hour
later. Randy has parked his hammered and scraped Acura in the guest parking
lot of Chester's house and Chester has parked his 1932 Dusenberg roadster in
the garage, between a Lamborghini and some other vehicle that would appear
to be literally an aircraft, built to hover on ducted fans.
"Uh, I can't say that I did," Randy says, trying not to gape at
anything. Even the pavement under his feet is some kind of custom made
mosaic of Penrose tiles. "I sort of vaguely remember it as being broad and
flat and not having any chuckholes. Well paved, in other words."
"This," Chester says, head faking towards his house, "was the first
house to trigger the LOHO."
"LOHO?"
"The Ludicrously Oversized Home Ordinance. Some malcontents rammed it
through the city council. You get these, like cardiovascular surgeons and
trust fund parasites who like to have big nice houses, but God forbid some
dirty hacker should try to build a house of his own, and send a few cement
trucks down their street occasionally."
"They made you repave the street?"
"They made me repave half the fucking town," Chester says. "I mean,
some of the neighbors were griping that the house was an eyesore, but after
we got off on the wrong foot my attitude was, to hell with 'em." Indeed,
Chester's house does resemble nothing so much as a regional trucking hub
with a roof made entirely of glass. He waves his arm down a patchily turfed
slab of mud that slopes down into Lake Washington. "Obviously the
landscaping hasn't even begun yet. So it looks like a science fair project
on erosion."
"I was going to say the Battle of the Somme," Randy says.
"Not as good an analogy because there are no trenches," Chester says.
He is still pointing down towards the lake. "But if you look near the
waterline you can just make out some railroad ties, half buried. That's
where we laid the tracks."
"Tracks?" Amy says, the only word she's been able to get out of her
mouth since Randy drove his Acura through the main gate. Randy told her, on
the way over here, that if he, Randy, had a hundred thousand dollars for
every order of magnitude by which Chester's net worth currently exceeds his,
then he (Randy) would never have to work again. This turned out to be more
clever than informative, and so Amy was not prepared for what they have
found here and is still steepling her eyebrows.
"For the locomotive," Chester says. "There are no railway lines nearby,
so we barged the locomotive in and then winched it up a short railway into
the foyer."
Amy just scrunches up her face, silent.
"Amy hasn't seen the articles," Randy says.
"Oh! Sorry," Chester says, "I'm into obsolete technology. The house is
a museum of dead tech. Stick your hand into these things."
Lined up before the front entrance are four waist high pedestals,
emblazoned with the Novus Ordo Seclorum eyeball/pyramid logo, with outlines
of hands stenciled onto their lids, and knobs in the lagoons between the
fingers. Randy fits his hand into place and feels the knobs slide in their
grooves, reading and memorizing the geometry of his hand. "The house knows
who you are now," Chester says, typing their names into a ruggedized,
weatherproofed keyboard, "and I'm giving you a certain privilege
constellation that I use for personal guests now you can come in through the
main gate and park your car and wander around the grounds whether or not I'm
home. And you can enter the house if I'm home, but if I'm not home, it'll be
locked to you. And you can wander freely in the house except for certain
offices where I keep proprietary corporate documents."
"You have your own company or something?" Amy says weakly.
"No. After Randy and Avi left town, I dropped out of college and
snagged a job with a local company, which I still have," Chester says.
The front door, a translucent crystal slab on a track, slides open.
Randy and Amy follow Chester into his house. As advertised, there is a
fullscale steam locomotive in the foyer.
"The house is patterned after flex space," Chester says.
"What's that?" Amy asks. She is completely turned off by the
locomotive.
"A lot of high tech companies get started in flex space, which just
means a big warehouse with no internal walls or partitions just a few
pillars to hold up the ceiling. You can drag partitions around to divide it
up into rooms."
"Like cubicles?"
"Same idea, but the partitions go up higher so you have a feeling of
being in a real room. Of course, they don't go all the way up to the
ceiling. Otherwise, there wouldn't be room for the TWA."
"The what?" Amy asks. Chester, who is leading them into the maze of
partitions, answers the question by tilting his head back and looking
straight up.
The roof of the house is made entirely of glass, held up by a trusswork
of white painted steel tubes. It is maybe forty or fifty feet above the
floor. The partitions rise to a height of maybe twelve feet. In the gap
above the partitions and below the ceiling, a grid has been constructed, a
scaffolding of red pipes, nearly as vast as the house itself. Thousands,
millions, of aluminum shreds are trapped in that space grid, like tom tufts
caught in a three dimensional screen. It looks like an artillery shell the
length of a football field that has exploded into shrapnel a microsecond ago
and been frozen in place; light filters through the metal scraps, trickles
down bundles of shredded wiring and glances flatly off the crusts of melted
and hardened upholstery. It is so vast and so close that when Amy and Randy
first look up at it they flinch, expecting it to fall on them. Randy already
knows what it is. But Amy has to stare at it for a long time, and prowl from
room to room, viewing it from different angles, before it takes shape in her
mind, and becomes recognizable as something familiar: a 747.
"The FAA and NTSB were surprisingly cool about it," Chester muses.
"Which makes sense. I mean, they've reconstructed this thing in a hangar,
right? Dredged up all the pieces, figured out where they go, and hung them
on this grid. They've gone over it and gathered all the forensic evidence
they could find, hosed out all the human remains and disposed of them
properly, sterilized the debris so that the crash investigation team doesn't
have to worry about getting AIDS from touching a bloody flange or something.
And they're done with it. And they're paying like rent on this hangar. They
can't throw it away. They have to store it somewhere. So all I had to do was
get the house certified as a federal warehouse, which was a pretty easy
legal hack. And if there's a lawsuit, I have to let the lawyers in to go
over it. But really it was not a problem to do this. The Boeing guys love
it, they're over here all the time."
"It's like a resource to them," Randy guesses.
"Yeah."
"You like to play that role."
"Sure! I have defined a privilege constellation specifically for
engineer types who can come here anytime they want to access the house as a
museum of dead tech. That's what I mean by the flex space analogy. To me and
my guests, it's a home. To these visitors . . . there's one right there."
Chester waves his arm across the room (it is a central room maybe fifty
meters on a side) at an engineer type who has set up a Hasselblad on a huge
tripod and is pointing it straight up at a bent landing gear strut ". . . to
them it's exactly like a museum in that there are places they can go and
other places that if they step over the line will set off alarms and get
them in trouble."
"Is there a gift shop?" Amy jokes.
"The gift shop is roughed in, but not up and running the LOHO throws up
all kinds of impediments," Chester grumbles.
They end up in a relatively cozy glass walled room with a view across
the churned mud to the lake. Chester fires up an espresso machine that looks
like a scale model of an oil refinery and generates a brace of lattes. This
room happens to be underneath the TWA's left wing tip, which is relatively
intact. Randy realizes, now, that the entire plane has been hung in a gentle
banking attitude, like it's making an imperceptible course change, which is
not really appropriate; a vertical dive would make more sense, but then the
house would have to be fifty stories high to accommodate it. He can see a
repeating pattern of tears in the wing's skin that seems to be an expression
of the same underlying math that generates repeating vortices in a wake, or
swirls in a Mandelbrot set. Charlene and his friends used to heckle him for
being a Platonist, but everywhere he goes he sees the same few ideal forms
shadowed in the physical world. Maybe he's just stupid or something.
The house lacks a woman's touch. Randy gathers, from hints dropped by
Chester, that the TWA has not turned out to be the conversation starter that
he had hoped it would be. He is considering building fake ceilings over some
of the house's partitions so that they will feel more like rooms, which, he
admits, might make "some people" feel more comfortable there and open the
possibility of their committing themselves to "an extended stay." So
evidently he is in early negotiations with some kind of female, which is
good news.
"Chester, two years ago you sent me e mail about a project you were
launching to build replicas of early computers. You wanted information about
my grandfather's work."
"Yeah," Chester says. "You want to see that stuff? It's been on the
back burner, but "
"I just inherited some of his notebooks," Randy says.
Chester's eyebrows go up. Amy glances out the window; her hair, skin,
and clothes take on a pronounced reddish tinge from Doppler effect as she
drops out of the conversation at relativistic velocity.
"I want to know if you have a functioning ETC card reader."
Chester snorts. "That's all?"
"That's all."
"You want a 1932 Mark III card reader? Or a 1938 Mark IV? Or a "
"Does it make any difference? They all read the same cards, right?"
"Yeah, pretty much."
"I have some cards from circa 1945 that I would like to have read out
onto a floppy disk that I can take home."
Chester picks up a cellphone the size of a gherkin and begins to prod
it. "I'll call my card man," he says. "Retired ETC engineer. Lives on Mercer
Island. Comes up here on his boat a couple times a week and tinkers with
this stuff. He'll be really excited to meet you."
While Chester is conversing with his card man, Amy meets Randy's eyes
and gives him a look that is almost perfectly unreadable. She seems a bit
deflated. Worn down. Ready to go home. Her very unwillingness to show her
feelings confirms this. Before this trip, Amy would have agreed that it
takes all kinds to make a world. She'd still assent to it now. But Randy's
been showing her some practical applications of that concept, in the last
few days, that are going to take her a while to fit into her world view. Or,
more importantly, into her Randy view. And sure enough, the moment Chester's
off the phone, she's asking if she can use it to call the airlines. There is
only a momentary upward flick of the eyes towards the TWA. And once Chester
gets over his astonishment that anyone still uses voice technology to make
airline reservations in this day and age, he takes her to the nearest
computer (there is a fully outfitted UNIX machine in every room) and patches
into the airline databases directly and begins searching for the optimal
route back home. Randy goes and stares out the window at the chilly
whitecaps slapping the mud shore and fights the urge to just stay here in
Seattle, which is a town where he could be very happy. Behind him Chester
and Amy keep saying "Manila," and it sounds ridiculously exotic and hard to
reach. Randy thinks that he is marginally smarter than Chester and would be
even richer if he'd only stayed here.
A fast white boat comes larruping around the point from the direction
of Mercer Island and banks towards him. Randy sets down his cold coffee and
goes out to his car and retrieves a certain trunk a lovely gift from a
delighted Aunt Nina. It is full of certain old treasures, like his
grandfather's high school physics notebooks. He sets aside (for example) a
box labeled HARVARD WATERHOUSE PRIME FACTOR CHALLENGE '49 52 to reveal a
stack of bricks, neatly wrapped in paper that has gone gold with age, each
consisting of a short stack of ETC cards, and each labeled ARETHUSA
INTERCEPTS with a date from 1944 or '45. They have been in suspended
animation for more than fifty years, stored on a dead medium, and now Randy
is going to breathe life into them again, and maybe send them out on the
Net, a few strands of fossil DNA broken out of their amber shells and
released in the world again.
Probably they will fail and die, but if they flourish, it should make
Randy's life a little more interesting. Not that it's devoid of interest
now, but it is easier to introduce new complications than to resolve the old
ones.
Chapter 73 ROCK
Bundok is good rock; whoever picked it must have known this. That
basalt is so strong that Goto Dengo can carve into it any system of tunnels
that he desires. As long as he observes a few basic engineering principles,
he need not worry about tunnels collapsing.
Of course, cutting holes into such rock is hard work. But Captain Noda
and Lieutenant Mori have provided him with an unlimited supply of Chinese
laborers. At first the chatter of their drills drowns out the sounds of the
jungle. Later, as they burrow into the earth, it fades to a thick tamping
beat, leaving only the buzzing drone of the air compressors. Even at night
they work by the dim light of lanterns, which cannot penetrate the canopy
overhead. Not that MacArthur is sending observation planes over Luzon in the
middle of the night, but work lights shining up on the mountain would be
noticed by the lowland Filipinos.
The inclined shaft connecting the bottom of Lake Yamamoto to Golgotha
is by far the longest part of the complex, but it need not have a very great
diameter: just big enough for a single worker to worm his way up to the end
and operate his drill. Before the lake is created, Goto Dengo has a crew dig
the extreme upper end of that shaft, tunneling out and down from the
riverbank with a dip angle of some twenty degrees. This excavation
continually fills up with water it is effectively a well and removing the
waste rock is murder, because it all has to be hauled uphill. So when it has
proceeded for some five meters, Goto Dengo has the opening sealed up with
stones and mortar.
Then he has the latrines' filled in, and the area around the lake
cleared of workers. They can do nothing now but contaminate the place with
evidence. Summer has arrived, the rainy season on Luzon, and he is worried
that rain will find the ruts worn into the soil by the Chinese workers' feet
and turn them into gullies, impossible to conceal. But the unusually dry
weather holds, and vegetation rapidly takes root on the bare ground.
Goto Dengo is faced with a challenge that would seem familiar to the
designer of a garden back home: he needs to create an artificial formation
that seems natural. It needs to look as though a boulder rolled down the
mountain after an earthquake and wedged itself in a bottleneck of the
Yamamoto River. Other rocks, and the logs of dead trees, piled up against
it, forming a natural dam that created the lake.
He finds the boulder he needs sitting in the middle of the riverbed
about a kilometer upstream. Dynamite would only shatter it, and so he brings
in a stout crew of workers with iron levers, and they get it rolling. It
goes a few meters and stops.
This is discouraging, but the workers have the idea now. Their leader
is Wing the bald Chinese man who helped Goto Dengo bury the corpse of
Lieutenant Ninomiya. He has the mysterious physical strength that seems to
be common among bald men, and he has a kind of mesmerizing leadership power
over the other Chinese. He somehow manages to get them excited about moving
the boulder. Of course, they have to move it, because Goto Dengo has let it
be known that he wants it moved, and if they don't, Lieutenant Mori's guards
will shoot them on the spot. But above and beyond this, they seem to welcome
the challenge. Certainly standing in cool running water beats working down
in the mineshafts of Golgotha.
The boulder is in place three days later. The water divides around it.
More boulders follow, and the river begins to pool. Trees do not naturally
sprout from lakes, and so Goto Dengo has workers fell the ones that are
standing here not with axes, though. He shows them how to excavate the roots
one at a time, like archaeologists digging up a skeleton, so that it looks
as if the trees were uprooted during a typhoon. These are piled up against
the boulders, and smaller stones and gravel follow. Suddenly the level of
Lake Yamamoto begins to rise. The dam leaks, but the leaks peter out as more
gravel and clay are dumped in behind it. Goto Dengo is not above plugging
troublesome holes with sheets of tin, as long as it's down where no one will
ever see it. When the lake has reached its desired level, the only sign it's
manmade is a pair of wires trailing up onto its shore, rooted in demolition
charges molded into the concrete plug on its bottom.
Golgotha is cut into a ridge of basalt that is flung out from the base
of the mountain like a buttress root from the trunk of a jungle tree that
separates the watersheds of the Yamamoto and Tojo Rivers. Moving southwards
from the summit of Calvary, then, one would pass through the teeming bowl of
its extinct crater first, over the remains of its southern rim, and then
onto the gradual downward slope of a much larger mountain on which Calvary's
cinder cone is just a blemish, like a wart on a nose. The small Yamamoto
River runs generally parallel to the Tojo on the other side of the basalt
ridge, but descends more gradually, so that its elevation gets higher and
higher above that of the Tojo River as both work their way down the
mountain. At the site of Lake Yamamoto, it is fifty meters above the Tojo.
By drilling the connecting tunnel in a southeasterly direction rather than
straight east underneath the ridge, one can bypass a chain of rapids and a
waterfall on the Tojo which drop that river's elevation to almost a hundred
meters beneath the bottom of the lake.
When The General comes to inspect the works, Goto Dengo astonishes him
by taking him up the Tojo River in the same Mercedes he used to drive down
from Manila. By this point, the workers have constructed a single lane road
that leads from the prison camp up the rocky bed of the river to Golgotha.
"Fortune has smiled on our endeavor by giving us a dry summer," Goto Dengo
explains. "With the water low, the riverbed makes an ideal roadway the rise
in altitude is gentle enough for the heavy trucks that we will be bringing
in. When we are finished, we will create a low dam near the site that will
conceal the most obvious signs of our work. When the river rises to its
normal height, there will be no visible trace that men were ever here."
"It is a good idea," The General concedes, then mumbles something to
his aide about using the same technique at the other sites. The aide nods
and hais and writes it down.
A kilometer into the jungle, the banks rise up into vertical walls of
stone that climb higher and higher above the water's level until they
actually overhang the river. There is a hollow in the stony channel where
the river broadens out; just upstream is the waterfall. At this point the
road makes a left turn directly into the rock wall, and stops. Everyone gets
out of the Mercedes: Goto Dengo, The General, his aide, and Captain Noda.
The river runs over their feet, ankle deep.
A mouse hole has been dug into the rock here. It has a flat bottom and
an arched ceiling. A six year old could stand upright in here, but anyone
taller will have to stoop. A pair of iron rails runs into the opening. "The
main drift," says Goto Dengo.
"This is it?"
"The opening is small so that we can conceal it later," Captain Noda
explains, cringing, "but it gets wider inside."
The General looks pissed off and nods. Led by Goto Dengo, all four men
squat and duck walk into the tunnel, pushed by a steady current of air.
"Notice the excellent ventilation," Captain Noda enthuses, and Goto Dengo
grins proudly.
Ten meters in, they are able to stand up. Here, the drift has the same
vaulted shape, but it's six feet high and six wide, buttressed by reinforced
concrete arches that they have poured in wooden forms on the floor. The iron
rails run far away into blackness. A train of three mine cars sits on them
sheet metal boxes filled with shattered basalt. "We remove waste by hand
tramming," Goto Dengo explains. "This drift, and the rails, are perfectly
level, to keep the cars from running out of control."
The General grunts. Clearly he has no respect for the intricacies of
mine engineering.
"Of course, we will use the same cars to move the, er, material into
the vault when it arrives," Captain Noda says.
"Where did this waste come from?" The General demands. He is pissed off
that they are still digging at this late stage.
"From our longest and most difficult tunnel the inclined shaft to the
bottom of Lake Yamamoto," says Goto Dengo. "Fortunately, we can continue to
extend that shaft even while the material is being loaded into the vault.
Outgoing cars will carry waste from the shaft work, incoming cars will carry
the material."
He stops to thrust his finger into a drill hole in the ceiling. "As you
can see, all of the holes are ready for the demolition charges. Not only
will those charges bring down the ceiling, but they