Cryptonomicon

Chapter 102 LIQUIDITY

The rest of it all seems like history to Randall Lawrence Waterhouse. He knows that technically speaking it is the present, and all of the really important stuff is future. But what's important to him is finished and settled. He would like to get on with his life, now that he's got one.

They carry Amy back to the missionary compound and the doctor who is there does some work on her leg, but they can't get her out to the hospital in Manila because Wing has blockaded them in there. This ought to seem threatening, but actually just seems stupid and annoying to them after they've had a little while to get used to it. The people who are doing it are Chinese Communist geronto-apparatchiks backed up by a few bootlicking cronies within the local government, and none of them has the slightest appreciation of things like encrypted spread-spectrum packet radio, which makes it easy for people like Doug and Randy to communicate with the outside world and explain precisely what is going on. Randy's blood type is compatible with Amy's and so he lets the doctor suck him nearly dry. The lack of blood seemingly halves his IQ for a day or two, but even so, when he sees Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe drawing up the shopping list of men and gear that they need to dig up Golgotha, he has enough presence of mind to say: strike all of that stuff. Forget the trucks and jackhammers and dynamite, the end-loaders and excavators and tunnel-boring machines, and just give me a drill, a couple of pumps, and a few thousand gallons of fuel oil. Doug gets it right away, as indeed how could he not, since he basically gave Randy the idea by telling him old war legends about his father. They get the shopping list out to Avi and Goto Dengo with no trouble at all.

Wing keeps them blockaded in the compound for a week; the subterranean explosions continue to shake the earth; Amy's leg gets infected and the doctor comes this close to sawing it off to save her life. Enoch Root spends some time alone with her and suddenly her leg gets a lot better. He explains that he applied a local folk remedy, but Amy refuses to say anything about it.

Meanwhile the rest of them kill time by clearing mines from around Golgotha, and trying to localize those explosions. The verdict seems to be that Wing still has most of a kilometer of hard rock to tunnel through in order to get access to Golgotha, and he's only making a few dozen meters per day.

They know that all hell is breaking loose in the outside world because media and military helicopters keep flying over the place. One day a Goto Engineering chopper lands in the compound. It's got earth-imaging sonar gear, and more importantly it's got antibiotics, which have a nearly magical impact on the jungle bugs in Amy's leg, which have never even met penicillin, much less this state-of-the-art stuff that makes penicillin look like chicken noodle soup. Amy's fever breaks in a couple of hours and she's hobbling within a day. The road gets opened up again and then their problem becomes trying to keep people out—it is jammed with media, opportunistic gold-seekers, and nerds. All of them apparently think they are present at some kind of radical societal watershed, as if global society has gotten so screwed up that the only thing to do is shut down and reboot it.

Randy sees people holding up banners with his name on them, and tries not to think about what this implies. The truckloads of equipment almost cannot make it through this traffic jam, but they do, and there's another really frustrating and tedious week of hauling all of the shit through the jungle. Randy spends most of his time hanging around with the earth-imaging sonar crew; they have this very cool gear that Goto Engineering uses to do CAT scans of the earth that they are about to dig into. By the time all of the heavy equipment is in place, Randy's got the entirety of Golgotha imaged down to a resolution of about a meter; he could fly through it in virtual reality if he were into that kind of thing. As it is, all he needs is to decide where to drill his three holes: two from the top down into the main vault, and then one from the side, coming in almost horizontally from the riverbank, but at a gentle upward angle, until it enters what he thinks is the lowest sump in the main chamber. The drain hole.

Someone arrives from the outside world and convinces Randy he's on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. Randy doesn't consider it to be good news. He knows that he's got a new life. He had a particular mental image of what that new life is: mostly, being married to Amy and minding his own business until he dies of old age. It did not enter his calculations that being on the cover of newsweeklies, and people standing in the jungle holding banners with his name on them, would in any way characterize his life. Now he never wants to leave the jungle.

The pumps are mighty, house-sized things; they have to be to fight the back-pressure that they are going to engender. Goto Dengo's young engineers see to it that they are mated into the two vertical holes on top: one to supply compressed air, the other pressurized fuel oil. Doug Shaftoe would like to be involved in this, but he knows it's over his head technically, and he's got other duties: securing the defensive perimeter against gold-seekers and whatever creepy-crawly individuals Wing might have sent out to harass and sabotage them. But Doug has put the Word out, and a whole lot of Doug's very interesting and well-traveled friends have converged on Golgotha from all over the world and are now camped out in foxholes in the jungle, guarding a defensive perimeter strung with monofilament tripwires and other stuff that Randy doesn't even want to know about. Doug just tells him to stay away from the perimeter, and he does. But Randy can sense Doug's interest in the central project here, and so when the big day comes, he lets Doug be the one to throw the switch.

There is a lot of praying first: Avi's brought in a rabbi from Israel, and Enoch Root has brought in the Archbishop of Manila, and Goto Dengo has flown in some Shinto priests, and various Southeast Asian countries have gotten in on the act too. All of them pray or chant for the memory of their departed, though the prayers are practically drowned out by the choppers overhead. A lot of people don't want them disturbing Golgotha at all, and Randy thinks they are basically right. But he's gone out and earth-imaged Wing's tunnel, this subterranean tentacle of air reaching towards the hoard, and released three-dimensional maps of everything to the media, and made the case—reasonably well, he thinks—that it's better to do something constructive than to let it get ripped off by the likes of Wing. Some people have come around to his side and some haven't, but none of the latter group is on the cover of Time and Newsweek.

Doug Shaftoe is the last guy to take the floor. He removes his mesh-back cap, puts it over his heart, and with tears streaming down his face says something about his father, whom he just barely remembers. He speaks of the Battle of Manila and of how he saw his father for the first time in the wreckage of the Church of San Agustin, and how his father carried him up and down the stairway there before going off to bring hellfire down upon the Nipponese. He speaks about forgiveness and certain other abstractions, and the words are all chopped up and blurred by the helicopters overhead, which only makes it more powerful as far as Randy's concerned, since it's basically all about a bunch of memories that are all chopped up and blurred in Doug's memory to begin with. Finally Doug works his way around to some kind of resolution that is very clear in his heart and mind but poorly articulated, and hits the switch.

The pumps take a few minutes to pressurize Golgotha with a highly combustible mixture of air and fuel oil, and then Doug hits another switch that sets off a small detonation down below. Then the world shudders and rumbles before settling down into a kind of suppressed throbbing howl. A jet of white-hot flame shoots out of the drain hole down below, digs itself into the river very close to where Andrew Loeb came to rest, and throws up a cloud of steam that forces all of the choppers to gain altitude. Randy crawls down under the cover of that steam-cloud, sensing it's the last privacy he'll ever have, and sits down by the edge of the river to watch. After half an hour the jet of hot gas is joined by a rivulet of incandescent fluid that sinks to the bottom of the stream as soon as it emerges, clothed in a fuzz of wildly boiling water. For a long time there is really nothing to be seen except steam; but after Golgotha's been burning for an hour or two, it becomes possible to see that underneath the shallow water, spreading down the valley floor, indeed right around the isolated boulder where Randy's perched, is a bright, thick river of gold.