Quantum

26

Kilkenny swiped his ID through the card reader that controlled the electronic lock on the door to the MARC Computer Center. The red light quickly changed to green, accompanied by an audible buzz and the release of the electrified magnets that held the door closed.

Inside, Bill ‘Grin’ Grinelli rose from behind the cluttered workstation that was the heart of the MARC computer network and smiled. He was a few inches shorter than Nolan and wore a black T-shirt, a pair of comfortably worn jeans, and his Birkenstock sandals. His shoulder-length brown-gray hair was drawn back in a ponytail, and he sported a pointed goatee that surrounded an infectious smile. Grin was the embodiment of free-spirited mischief, and the tattoo of a mythological Pan seated on a crescent moon scattering pixie dust that adorned his left forearm only enhanced that perception.

‘Nolan, what’s up, man? Long time, no see. I heard about the excitement in South Bend. I guess trouble just seems to find you.’

‘Same old, same old, my friend.’

Grin laughed. ‘I hear ya, man. Guys like us don’t have to look for trouble; like bees to honey it finds us well enough on its own.’

As MARC’s MIS director, Grin kept information, the lifeblood of the consortium, flowing freely through the building’s electronic veins and arteries. The apparent ease with which he handled his job was even more amazing considering the diversity of personal computers and workstations within the consortium.

At the heart of Grin’s electronic empire stood a pair of supercomputers that he considered his personal property, a recently acquired Moy Electronics massively parallel machine and MARC’s original Cray. The tall, thin Moy machine stood in marked contrast to the squat, cylindrical form of the Cray, prompting Grin to christen them Stan and Ollie. Affixed to the front panel of each machine was a photograph of its comic namesake.

‘Miss me down here?’ Nolan asked, shaking Grin’s outstretched hand.

‘You know it. I had to put Stan in all by my lone-some. Well, me and half a dozen techs from Moy.’

‘How’s he running?’

‘Like a champ.’

‘Great, because I’ve got a problem I’d like him to take a shot at. How are you at cracking encryption?’

‘Officially, I never touch the stuff.’

‘How about unofficially?’

‘You remember that two-hundred-and-fifty-six-bit scheme some genius thought up for the government, supposedly unbreakable?’

‘You’re the one who cracked it?’

‘I must confess. I did have my hand in that little caper. I do so love a challenge.’

‘I’m glad to hear you talk that way. Let me show you what I’ve got.’

Kilkenny pulled a chair around the console, seating himself next to Grin.

‘Log in to main campus and jump down to the library’s Preservation Lab server.’

‘Surf’s up,’ Grin replied as he clicked on the graphical icons that identified other computer networks connected to MARC. ‘And we’re in.’

‘We’re looking for a directory named Wolff Codex.’

‘Kodak, like the film company?’

‘No, codex, like Leonardo da Vinci’s illustrated notebooks. What I want to show you are high-resolution scans taken from the pages of some very old notebooks that were found with that body down on campus.’

‘The murdered professor?’

‘That’s the one. Johann Wolff taught physics at the university for a couple of years after the Second World War, right up to the day he was murdered. It’s the considered opinion of some well-respected physicists, one of whom you know—’

‘Kelsey?’

Nolan nodded. ‘—that the late Professor Wolff may have been one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century.’

‘Last time I checked the calendar, it was the twenty-first century, big guy.’

‘Maybe so, but if Kelsey and Sandstrom are correct, had Wolff not been murdered, the twenty-first century, technologically speaking, might have started thirty years ago.’

Grin let out a long, slow whistle.

‘Is there much left of these notebooks?’

‘Actually, the books are in surprisingly good shape. The experts tell me that the books were all well-made cloth hardcovers with reasonably high quality paper. The tunnel segment they were buried in protected them like a time capsule. There was very little damage to any of the notebooks.’

‘I don’t remember reading anything about notebooks being found with the body.’

‘The police are keeping that quiet because we don’t know what’s in the notebooks yet. They expect us to keep quiet as well. You’ll see why in a minute.’

Grin navigated through the Preservation Lab’s file tree, eventually locating the folder icon named Wolff Codex. When Grin selected the icon, a window appeared requesting an access password.

‘Well?’ Grin said impatiently as he looked to Nolan for assistance.

‘I picked something I thought you could remember: MTEV two nine oh two eight.’

Grin turned and smiled. ‘The number of feet Mount Everest is above sea level. I’m touched. You remembered my fondness for mountain climbing.’

Grin keyed in the password and was granted access to the file. The Wolff Codex folder split into six subfolders labeled VOL1 through VOL6.

‘Click on volume one. I doubt there’s anything in the other folders yet.’

As Grin selected it, VOL1 split into dozens of graphic image files. Each file bore the name of the page whose digitally recorded image it contained. VOL1 contained image files PAGE001 through PAGE016.

‘Pick page one,’ Nolan said.

Grin selected the PAGE001 icon, and his monitor filled with the scanned image of the first page from Wolff’s oldest notebook.

‘What am I looking at here?’

‘This is volume one, page one of the Wolff Codex.’

‘What language is this written in?’ Grin asked.

‘None that I can understand. Zoom in on a block of text.’

Grin selected a section of text from the upper left corner of the page. The enhanced image darkened the characters, amplifying Wolff’s bold, confident strokes.

‘That look like any code you’ve ever seen?’

‘It’s definitely not your basic letter-swap encryption, that’s for damn sure. There’s no obvious order, but you’d expect that in a serious piece of coding. Is the base language English?’

‘Don’t know. Wolff was a native German who spoke several European languages as well as English. He’d only been in the States for the last two years of his life.’

‘It might be Enigma.’

‘Enigma?’

‘Yeah, the code used by Germany during the Second World War.’

‘I guess it’s possible.’

‘They didn’t happen to find a coding machine with these notebooks, did they? It would look like a typewriter in a wooden box.’

‘No, but check out the file called ENDPAPER.’

Grin selected the file. When it appeared, Grin’s eyebrows shot up.

‘Whoa, that is some serious, heavy-duty math, my friend.’

‘Well out of my league,’ Nolan admitted. ‘I found this algorithm in the front of all six notebooks. My guess is that it’s the cipher Wolff used to encrypt the notebooks.’

‘Hmm. Didn’t happen to see a key for this thing anywhere, did you?’

‘No.’

‘Too bad. Well, I guess I can try to feed this to Stan and Ollie and see what they come up with. Once I figure out how this algorithm works, I can apply some brute force to cracking it.’