“This the fellow we’ve been waiting for,” Chattan says to Robson. “The one we could’ve used in Algiers.”
“Yes!” Robson says. “Welcome to Detachment 2701, Captain Waterhouse.”
“2702,” Waterhouse says.
Chattan and Robson look ever so mildly startled.
“We can’t use 2701 because it is the product of two primes.”
“I beg your pardon?” Robson says.
One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don’t know what the hell you are talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault. Robson has the look of a man who has come up through the ranks. A Yank of that type would already be scornful and blustery.
“Which ones?” Chattan says. That is encouraging; he at least knows what a prime number is.
“73 and 37,” Waterhouse says.
This makes a profound impression on Chattan. “Ah, yes, I see.” He shakes his head. “I shall have to give the Prof a good chaffing about this.”
Robson has cocked his head far to one side so that it is almost resting upon the thick woolly beret chucked into his epaulet. He is squinting, and has an aghast look about him. His hypothetical Yank counterpart would probably demand, at this point, a complete explanation of prime number theory, and when it was finished, denounce it as horseshit. But Robson just lets it go by. “Am I to understand that we are changing the number of our Detachment?”
Waterhouse swallows. It seems clear from Robson’s reaction that this is going to involve a great deal of busy-work for Robson and his men: weeks of painting and stenciling and of trying to propagate the new number throughout the military bureaucracy. It will be a miserable pain in the ass.
“2702 it is,” Chattan says breezily. Unlike Waterhouse, he has no difficulty issuing difficult, unpopular commands.
“Right then, I must see to some things. Pleasure making your acquaintance, Captain Waterhouse.”
“Pleasure’s mine.”
Robson shakes Waterhouse’s hand again and excuses himself.
“We have a billet for you in one of the huts to the south of the canteen,” Chattan says. “Bletchley Park is our nominal headquarters, but we anticipate that we will spend most of our time in those theaters where heaviest use is being made of Ultra.”
“I take it you’ve been in North Africa,” Waterhouse says.
“Yes.” Chattan raises his eyebrows, or rather the ridges of skin where his eyebrows are presumably located; the hairs are colorless and transparent, like nylon monofilament line. “Just got out by the skin of our teeth there, I’m afraid.”
“Had a close shave, did you?”
“Oh, I don’t mean it that way,” Chattan says. “I’m talking about the integrity of the Ultra secret. We are still not sure whether we have survived it. But the Prof has done some calculations suggesting that we may be out of the woods.”
“The Prof is what you call Dr. Turing?”
“Yes. He recommended you personally, you know.”
“When the orders came through, I speculated as much.”
“Turing is presently engaged on at least two other fronts of the information war, and could not be part of our happy few.”
“What happened in North Africa, Colonel Chattan?”
“It’s still happening,” Chattan says bemusedly. “Our Marine squad is still in-theater, widening the bell curve.”
“Widening the bell curve?”
“Well, you know better than I do that random things typically have a bell-shaped distribution. Heights, for example. Come over to this window, Captain Waterhouse.”
Waterhouse joins Chattan at a bay window, where there is a view across acres of what used to be gently undulating farmland. Looking beyond the wooded belt to the uplands miles away, he can see what Bletchley Park probably used to look like: green fields dotted with clusters of small buildings.
But that is not what it looks like now. There is hardly a piece of land within half a mile that has not been recently paved or built upon. Once you get beyond the Mansion and its quaint little outbuildings, the park consists of one-story brick structures, nothing more than long corridors with multiple transepts: +++++++, and new +’s being added as fast as the masons can slap bricks on mud (Waterhouse wonders, idly, whether Rudy has seen aerial reconnaissance photos of this place, and deduced from all of those +’s the mathematical nature of the enterprise). The tortuous channels between buildings are narrow, and each is made twice as narrow by an eight-foot-high blast wall running down the middle of it, so that the Jerries will have to spend at least one bomb for each building.
“In that building there,” Chattan says, pointing to a small building not far away—a truly wretched-looking brick hovel—“are the Turing Bombes. That’s ‘bombe’ with an ‘e’ on the end. They are calculating machines invented by your friend the Prof.”
“Are they true universal Turing machines?” Waterhouse blurts. He is in the grip of a stunning vision of what Bletchley Park might, in fact, be: a secret kingdom in which Alan has somehow found the resources needed to realize his great vision. A kingdom ruled not by men but by information, where humble buildings made of + signs house Universal Machines that can be configured to perform any computable operation.
“No,” Chattan says, with a gentle, sad smile.
Waterhouse exhales for a long time. “Ah.”
“Perhaps that will come next year, or the next.”
“Perhaps.”
“The bombes were adapted, by Turing and Welchman and others, from a design dreamed up by Polish cryptanalysts. They consist of rotating drums that test many possible Enigma keys with great speed. I’m sure the Prof will explain it to you. But the point is that they have these vast pegboards in the back, like telephone switchboards, and some of our girls have the job of putting the right pegs into the right holes and wiring the things up every day. Requires good eyesight, careful attention, and height.”
“Height?”
“You’ll notice that the girls who are assigned to that particular duty are unusually tall. If the Germans were to somehow get their hands on the personnel records for all of the people who work at Bletchley Park, and graph their heights on a histogram, they would see a normal bell-shaped curve, representing most of the workers, with an abnormal bump on it—representing the unusual population of tall girls whom we have brought in to work the plug boards.”
“Yes, I see,” Waterhouse says, “and someone like Rudy—Dr. von Hacklheber—would notice the anomaly, and wonder about it.”
“Precisely,” Chattan says. “And it would then be the job of Detachment 2702—the Ultra Mega Group—to plant false information that would throw your friend Rudy off the scent.” Chattan turns away from the window, strolls over to his desk, and opens a large cigarette box, neatly stacked with fresh ammunition. He offers one to Waterhouse with a deft hand gesture, and Waterhouse accepts it, just to be social. As Chattan is giving him a light, he gazes through the flame into Waterhouse’s eye and says, “I put it to you now. How would you go about concealing from your friend Rudy that we had a lot of tall girls here?”
“Assuming that he already had the personnel records?”
“Yes.”
“Then it would be too late to conceal anything.”
“Granted. Let us instead assume that he has some channel of information that is bringing him these records, a few at a time. This channel is still open and functioning. We cannot shut it down. Or perhaps we choose not to shut it down, because even the absence of this channel will tell Rudy something important.”
“Well, there you go then,” Waterhouse says. “We gin up some false personnel records and plant them in the channel.”
There is a small chalkboard on the wall of Chattan’s office. It is a palimpsest, not very well erased; the housekeeping detail here must have a standing order never to clean it, lest something important be lost. As Waterhouse approaches it, he can see older calculations layered atop each othe
r, fading off into the blackness like transmissions of white light propagating into deep space.
He recognizes Alan’s handwriting all over the place. It takes a physical effort not to stand there and try to reconstruct Alan’s calculations from the ghosts lingering on the slate. He draws over them only with reluctance.
Waterhouse slashes an abscissa and an ordinate onto the board, then sweeps out a bell-shaped curve. On top of the curve, to the right of the peak, he adds a little bump.
“The tall girls,” he explains. “The problem is this notch.” He points to the valley between the main peak and the bump. Then he draws a new peak high and wide enough to cover both:
“We can do that by planting fake personnel records in Rudy’s channel, giving heights that are taller than the overall average, but shorter than the bombe girls.”
“But now you’ve dug yourself another hole,” Chattan says. He is leaning back in his officer’s swivel chair, holding the cigarette in front of his face, regarding Waterhouse through a motionless cloud of smoke.
Waterhouse says, “The new curve looks a little better because I filled in that gap, but it’s not really bell-shaped. It doesn’t tail off right, out here at the edges. Dr. von Hacklheber will notice that. He’ll realize that someone’s been tampering with his channel. To prevent that from happening I would have to plant more fake records, giving some unusually large and small values.”
“Invent some fake girls who were exceptionally short or tall,” Chattan says.
“Yes. That would make the curve tail off in the way that it should.”
Chattan continues to look at him expectantly.
Waterhouse says, “So, the addition of a small number of what would otherwise be bizarre anomalies makes it all look perfectly normal.”
“As I said,” Chattan says, “our squad is in North Africa—even as we speak—widening the bell curve. Making it all look perfectly normal.”
MEAT
* * *
OKAY, SO PRIVATE FIRST CLASS GERALD HOTT, LATE of Chicago, Illinois, did not exactly shoot up through the ranks during his fifteen-year tenure in the United States Army. He did, however, carve a bitchin’ loin roast. He was as deft with a boning knife as Bobby Shaftoe is with a bayonet. And who is to say that a military butcher, by conserving the limited resources of a steer’s carcass and by scrupulously observing the mandated sanitary practices, might not save as many lives as a steely-eyed warrior? The military is not just about killing Nips, Krauts, and Dagoes. It is also about killing livestock—and eating them. Gerald Hott was a front-line warrior who kept his freezer locker as clean as an operating room and so it is only fitting that he has ended up there.
Bobby Shaftoe makes this little elegy up in his head as he is shivering in the sub-Arctic chill of a formerly French, and now U.S. Army, meat locker the size and temperature of Greenland, surrounded by the earthly remains of several herds of cattle and one butcher. He has attended more than a few military funerals during his brief time in the service, and has always been bowled over by the skill of the chaplains in coming up with moving elegies for the departed. He has heard rumors that when the military inducts 4-Fs who are discovered to have brains, it teaches them to type and assigns them to sit at desks and type these things out, day after day. Nice duty if you can get it.
The frozen carcasses dangle from meathooks in long rows. Bobby Shaftoe gets tenser and tenser as he works his way up and down the aisles, steeling himself for the bad thing he is about to see. It is almost preferable when your buddy’s head suddenly explodes just as he is puffing his cigarette into life—buildup like this can drive you nuts.
Finally he rounds the end of a row and discovers a man slumbering on the floor, locked in embrace with a pork carcass, which he was apparently about to butcher at the time of his death. He has been there for about twelve hours now and his body temp is hovering around minus ten degrees Fahrenheit.
Bobby Shaftoe squares himself to face the body and draws a deep breath of frosty, meat-scented air. He clasps his cyanotic hands in front of his chest in a manner that is both prayerful and good for warming them up. “Dear Lord,” he says out loud. His voice does not echo; the carcasses soak it up. “Forgive this marine for these, his duties, which he is about to perform, and while you are at it, by all means forgive this marine’s superiors whom You in Your infinite wisdom have seen fit to bless him with, and forgive their superiors for getting the whole deal together.”
He considers going on at some length but finally decides that this is no worse than bayonetting Nips and so let’s get on with it. He goes to the locked bodies of PFC Gerald Hott and Frosty the Pig and tries to separate them without success. He squats by them and gives the former a good look. Hott is blond. His eyes are half-closed, and when Shaftoe shines a flashlight into the slit, he can see a glint of blue. Hott is a big man, easily two-twenty-five in fighting trim, easily two-fifty now. Life in a military kitchen does not make it easy for a fellow to keep his weight down, or (unfortunately for Hott) his cardiovascular system in any kind of dependable working order.
Hott and his uniform were both dry when the heart attack happened, so thank god the fabric is not frozen onto the skin. Shaftoe is able to cut most of it off with several long strokes of his exquisitely sharpened V-44 “Gung Ho” knife. But the V-44’s machetelike nine-and-a-half-inch blade is completely inappropriate for close infighting—viz., the denuding of the armpits and groin—and he was told to be careful about inflicting scratches, so there he has to break out the USMC Marine Raider stiletto, whose slender double-edged seven-and-a-quarter-inch blade might have been designed for exactly this sort of procedure, though the fish-shaped handle, which is made of solid metal, begins freezing to the sweaty palm of Shaftoe’s hand after a while.
Lieutenant Ethridge is hovering outside the locker’s tomblike door. Shaftoe barges past him and heads straight for the building’s exit, ignoring Ethridge’s queries: “Shaftoe? How ’bout it?”
He does not stop until he is out of the shade of the building. The North African sunshine breaks over his body like a washtub of morphine. He closes his eyes and turns his face into it, holds his frozen hands up to cup the warmth and let it trickle down his forearms, drip from his elbows.
“How ’bout it?” Ethridge says again.
Shaftoe opens his eyes and looks around.
The harbor’s a blue crescent with miles of sere jetties snaking around each other like diagrams of dance steps. One of them’s covered with worn stumps of ancient bastions and next to it a French battleship lies half-sunk, still piping smoke and steam into the air. All around it, the ships of Operation Torch are unloading shit faster than you can believe. Cargo nets rise from the holds of the transports and splat onto the quays like giant loogies. Longshoremen haul, trucks carry, troops march, French girls smoke Yankee cigarettes, Algerians propose joint ventures.
Between those ships, and the Army’s meat operation, up here on this rock, is what Bobby Shaftoe takes to be the City of Algiers. To his discriminating Wisconsinan eye it does not appear to have been built so much as swept up on the hillside by a tidal wave. A lot of acreage has been devoted to keeping the fucking sun off, so from above, it has a shuttered-up look about it—lots of red tile, decorated with flowers and Arabs. Looks like a few modern concrete structures (e.g. this meat locker) have been thrown up by the French in the wake of some kind of vigorous slum-clearing offensive. Still, there’s a lot of slums left to be cleared—target number one being this human beehive or anthill just off to Shaftoe’s left, the Casbah, they call it. Maybe it’s a neighborhood. Maybe it’s a single poorly organized building. Has to be seen to be believed. Arabs packed into the place like fraternity pledges into a telephone booth.
Shaftoe turns around and looks again at the meat locker, which is dangerously exposed to enemy air attack here, but no one gives a fuck because who cares if the Krauts blow up a bunch of meat?
Lieutenant Ethridge, almost as desperately sunburned as Bobby Shaftoe, squints.
“Blond,” Shaftoe says.
“Okay.”
“Blue-eyed.”
“Good.”
“Anteater—not mushroom.”
“Huh?”
“He’s not circumcised, sir!”
“Excellent! How ’bout the other thing?”
“One tattoo, sir!”
Shaftoe is enjoying the slow buildup of tension in Ethridge’s voice: “Describe the tattoo, Sergeant!”
“Sir! It is a commonly seen military design, sir! Consisting of a heart with a female’s name in it.”
“What is that name, Sergeant?” Ethridge is on the verge of pissing his pants.
“Sir! The name inscribed on the tattoo is the following name: Griselda. Sir!”
“Aaaah!” Lieutenant Ethridge lets loose deep from the diaphragm. Veiled women turn and look. Over in that Casbah, starved-looking, shave-needing ragheads lean out of spindly towers yodeling out of key.
Ethridge shuts up and contents himself with clenching his fists until they go white. When he speaks again, his voice is hushed with emotion. “Battles have hinged on lesser strokes of luck than this one, Sergeant!”
“You’re telling me!?” Shaftoe says. “When I was on Guadalcanal, sir, we got trapped in this little cove and pinned down—”
“I don’t want to hear the lizard story, Sergeant!”
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
Once when Bobby Shaftoe was still in Oconomowoc, he had to help his brother move a mattress up a stairway and learned new respect for the difficulty of manipulating heavy but floppy objects. Hott, may God have mercy on his soul, is a heavy S.O.B., and so it is excellent luck that he is frozen solid. After the Mediterranean sun has its way with him, he is sure enough going to be floppy. And then some.
All of Shaftoe’s men are down in the detachment’s staging area. This is a cave built into a sheer artificial cliff that rises from the Mediterranean, just above the docks. These caves go on for miles and there is a boulevard running over the top of them. But even the approaches to their particular cave have been covered with tents and tarps so that no one, not even Allied troops, can see what they are up to: namely, looking for any equipment with 2701 painted on it, painting over the last digit, and changing it to 2. The first operation is handled by men with green paint and the second by men with white or black paint.
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