Cryptonomicon

Chapter 53 LAVENDER ROSE

Randy wants to go down and look at the U-boat in person. Doug says evenly that Randy is welcome to do so, but he needs to draw up a valid dive plan first, and reminds him that the depth of the wreck is one hundred and fifty-four meters. Randy nods as if he had, of course, expected to draw up a dive plan.

He wants everything to be like driving cars, where you just hop in and go. He knows a couple of guys who fly airplanes, and he can still remember how he felt when he learned that you can't just get in a plane (even a small one) and take off—you have to have a flight plan, and it takes a whole briefcase full of books and tables and specialized calculators, and access to weather forecasts above and beyond the normal consumer-grade weather forecasts, to come up with even a bad, wrong flight plan that will surely kill you. Once Randy had gotten used to this idea, he grudgingly admitted it made sense.

Now Doug Shaftoe's telling him he needs a plan just to strap some tanks on his back and swim a hundred and fifty-four meters (straight down, admittedly) and back. So Randy yanks a couple of diving books off the bungeed shelves of Glory IV and tries to come up with even a vague idea of what Doug's talking about. Randy has never gone scuba diving in his life, but he's seen them doing it on Jacques Cousteau and it seems straightforward enough.

The first three books he consults contain more than enough detail to perfectly reproduce the crestfallenness that Randy experienced when he learned about flight plans. Before he'd opened the books Randy had gotten out his mechanical pencil and his graph paper in preparation for making marks on the page; half an hour later he's still trying to get a handle on the contents of the tables, and he hasn't made any marks at all. He notes that the depths in these tables only go down as far as a hundred and thirty, and at that level they only talk in terms of staying down there five or ten minutes. And yet he knows that Amy, and the Shaftoe's colorful and ever-enlarging cast of polyethnic scuba divers, are spending much longer at this depth, and are in fact beginning to come up to the surface with artifacts from the wreck. There is, for example, an aluminum briefcase wherein Doug hopes to find clues as to who was on this U-boat and why it was on the wrong side of the planet.

Randy begins to fear that the entire wreck is going to be stripped bare before he even makes any marks on his piece of graph paper. The divers show up, one or two each day, on speedboats or outrigger canoes from Palawan. Blond surf boys, taciturn galoots, cigarette-smoking Frenchmen, Nintendo-playing Asians, beer-can-crumpling ex-Navy guys, blue-collar hillbillies. They all have diving plans. Why doesn't Randy have a diving plan?

He starts sketching one out based on the depth of one hundred and thirty, which seems reasonably close to one hundred and fifty-four. After working on it for about an hour (long enough to imagine all sorts of specious details) he happens to notice that the table he's been using is in feet, not meters, which means that all of these divers have been going down to a depth that is way more than three times as deep as the maximum that is even talked about on these tables.

Randy closes up all of the books and looks at them peevishly for a while. They are all nice new books with color photographs on the covers. He picked them off the shelf because (getting introspective here) he is a computer guy, and in the computer world any book printed more than two months ago is a campy nostalgia item. Investigating a little more, he finds that all three of these shiny new books have been personally autographed by the authors, with long personal inscriptions: two addressed to Doug, and one to Amy. The one to Amy has obviously been written by a man who is desperately in love with her. Reading it is like moisturizing with Tabasco.

He concludes that these are all consumer-grade diving books written for rum-drenched tourists, and furthermore that the publishers probably had teams of lawyers go over them one word at a time to make sure there would not be liability trouble. That the contents of these books, therefore, probably represent about one percent of everything that the authors actually know about diving, but that the lawyers have made sure that the authors don't even mention that.

Okay, so divers have mastered a large body of occult knowledge. That explains their general resemblance to hackers, albeit physically fit hackers.

Doug Shaftoe is not going down to the wreck himself. As a matter of fact he looked surprised, bordering on contemptuous, when Randy asked him whether he would go down. Instead, he's going over the stuff that is brought up from the wreck by the younger divers. They began by doing a photographic survey, using digital cameras, and Doug's been printing out blowups of the inside of the U-boat on his laser printer and pasting them up around the walls of his personal wardroom on Glory IV.

Randy does a sorting procedure on the diving books now: he ignores anything that has color photographs, or that appears to have been published within the last twenty years, or that has any quotes on the back cover containing the words stunning, superb, user-friendly, or, worst of all, easy-to-understand. He looks for old, thick books with worn-out bindings and block-lettered titles like DIVE MANUAL. Anything with angry marginal notes written by Doug Shaftoe gets extra points.

At this point, a diver comes up with a piece of actual gold, but it's not a bar: it's a sheet of hammered gold, maybe eight inches on a side and about a quarter of a millimeter thick, with a pattern of tiny neat holes punched through it, like a computer card. Randy spends a couple of days obsessing over this artifact. He learns that it came out of a crate stored in the hold of the U-boat, and that there are thousands more of them.

Now all of a sudden he's reading stuff by guys whose names are preceded by naval ranks and succeeded by M.D.s and Ph.D.s and they are going on for dozens of pages about the physics of nitrogen bubble formation in the knee, for example. There are photographs of cats strapped down in benchtop pressure chambers. Randy learns that the reason Doug Shaftoe doesn't dive to one hundred and fifty-four meters is that certain age-related changes in the joints tend to increase the likelihood of bubble formation during the decompression process. He comes to terms with the fact that the pressure at the depth of the wreck is going to be fifteen or sixteen atmospheres, meaning that as he ascends to the surface, any nitrogen bubbles that happen to be rattling around in his body are going to get fifteen or sixteen times as large as they were to begin with and that this is true whether those bubbles happen to be in his brain, his knee, the little blood vessels of the eyeball, or trapped underneath his fillings. He develops a sophisticated layman's understanding of dive medicine, which amounts to little because everyone's body is different—hence the need for each diver to have a completely different dive plan. Randy will need to figure out his body fat percentage before he can even begin marking up his sheet of graph paper.

It is also path-dependent. These divers' bodies get partly saturated with nitrogen every time they go down, and not all of it goes out of their bodies when they come back up—all of them, sitting around Glory IV playing cards, drinking beer, talking to their girlfriends on their GSM phones, are all outgassing all the time—nitrogen is seeping out of their bodies into the atmosphere, and each one of them knows more or less how much nitrogen's stuffed into his body at any given moment and understands, in a deep and nearly intuitive way, just exactly how that information propagates through any dive plan that he might be cooking up inside the powerful dive-planning supercomputer that each of these guys apparently carries around in his nitrogen-saturated brain.

One of the divers comes up with a plank from the crate that contained the stacks of gold sheets. It is in very bad shape, and it's still fizzing as gas comes out of it. Fizzing in a way that Randy has no trouble imagining his bones would do if he made any errors in working out his dive plan. There is some stenciled lettering just barely visible on the wood: NIZ-ARCH.

Glory IV has compressors for pumping air up to insanely high pressures to fill the scuba tanks. Randy develops an awareness that the pressure has to be insanely high or it won't even emerge from the tanks while these guys are down at depth. The divers are all being suffused with this pressurized gas; he half expects that one of these divers is going to bump into something and explode into a pink mushroom cloud.

“Randy?” says Doug Shaftoe, and beckons him into his wardroom.

The inside of the wardroom door is decorated with a big color photograph of a massive stone staircase in a dusty church. They stand in front of it. “Are there a lot of Waterhouses?” Doug asks. “Is it a common name?”

“Uh, well, it's not a rare name.”

“Is there anything you'd like to share with me about your family history?”

Randy knows that as a possible suitor to Amy, he will be undergoing thorough scrutiny at all times. The Shaftoes are doing due diligence on him. “What kind of thing are you looking for? Something terrible? I don't think there's anything worth hiding from you.”

Doug stares at him distractedly for a while, then turns to face the now open aluminum briefcase from the U-boat. Randy supposes that merely opening it required coming up with a detailed plan. Doug has spread out miscellaneous contents on a tabletop to be photographed and cataloged. Ex-Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe has, at the peak of his career, become a sort of librarian.

Randy sees a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, a fountain pen, a few rusty paper clips. But it looks as though a lot of sodden paper was taken out of that briefcase too, and Doug Shaftoe has been carefully drying it out and trying to read it. “Most wartime paper was crap,” he says. “It probably dissolved into mush within days of the sinking. The paper in this briefcase was at least protected from marine critters, but most of it's gone. However, the owner of this briefcase was apparently some sort of aristocrat. Check out the glasses, the pen.”

Randy checks them out. The divers have found teeth and fillings in the wreck, but nothing that qualifies as a body. The places where people died are marked by these trails of hard, inert remains, such as eyeglasses. Like the debris footprint of an exploded airliner.

“So what I'm getting at is that he had a few scraps of good paper in his briefcase,” Doug continues. “Personal stationery. So we suspect his name was Rudolf von Hacklheber. Does that name ring any bells with you?”

“No. But I could do a web search…”

“I tried that,” Doug says. “Turned up just a few hits. There was a man by that name who wrote a couple of mathematics papers back in the thirties. And there are some organizations in and around Leipzig, Germany, that use the name: a hotel, a theater, a defunct reinsurance company. That's about it.”

“Well, if he was a mathematician, he might have had some connection with my grandfather. Is that why you were asking about my family?”

“Check this out,” Doug says, and pings one fingernail against a glass tray full of a transparent liquid. An envelope, unglued and spreadeagled, is floating in it. Randy bends over and peers at it. Something has been written on the back in pencil, but it's impossible to read because the flaps of the envelope have been spread apart. “May I?” he asks. Doug nods and hands him a couple of latex surgical gloves. “I don't have to file a diving plan for this, do I?” Randy asks, wiggling his fingers into the gloves.

Doug is not amused. “It is deeper than it looks,” he says.

Randy flips the envelope over, then folds the flaps back together, reassembling the inscription. It says: