Chapter 25 THE CASTLE

Just as Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse detrains, some rakehell hits him full in the face with a turn of brackish ice water. The barrage continues as he walks a gauntlet of bucket-slinging ne'er-do-wells. But then he realizes no one's there. This is just an intrinsic quality of the local atmosphere, like fog in London.

The staircase that leads over the tracks to Utter Maurby Terminal is enclosed with roof and walls, forming a gigantic organ pipe that resonates with an infrasonic throb as it is pummeled by wind and water. As he walks into the lower end of the staircase, the storm is suddenly peeled away from his face and he is able to stand there for a moment and give this phenom the full appreciation it deserves.

Wind and water have been whipped into an essentially random froth by the storm. A microphone held up in the air would register only white noise-a complete absence of information. But when that noise strikes the long tube of the staircase, it drives a physical resonance that manifests itself in Waterhouse's brain as a low hum. The physics of the tube extract a coherent pattern from meaningless noise! If only Alan were here!

Waterhouse experiments by singing the harmonics of this low fundamental tone: octave, fifth, fourth, major third, and so on. Each one resonates in the staircase to a greater or lesser degree. It is the same series of notes made by a brass instrument. By hopping from one note to another, Waterhouse is able to play some passable bugle calls on the staircase. He does a pretty decent reveille.

"How lovely!"

He spins around. A woman is standing behind him, lugging a portmanteau the size of a hay bale. She is perhaps fifty years old, with the physique of a stove, and she had a nice new big-city permanent until a few seconds ago when she stepped out of the train. Salt water is running down her face and neck and disappearing beneath her sturdy frock of grey Qwghlm wool.

"Ma'am," Waterhouse says. Then he busies himself with hauling her portmanteau up to the top of the stairs. This puts the two of them, and all of their luggage, on a narrow covered bridge that leads across the tracks and into the terminal building. The bridge has windows in it, and Waterhouse suffers a nauseating attack of vertigo as he looks through them, and through the half inch of rain and saltwater that is streaming down them at any given moment, towards the North Atlantic Ocean. This major body of water is only a stone's throw away and is trying vigorously to get much closer. This must be an optical illusion, but the tops of the waves appear to be level with the plane on which they're standing despite the fact that it's at least twenty feet off the ground. Each one of those waves must weigh as much as all of the freight trains in Great Britain combined, and they are rolling towards them relentlessly, simply hammering the living daylights out of the rocks. It all makes Waterhouse want to pitch a fit, fall down, and throw up. He plugs his ears.

"Are you a bandsman, then, I take it?" the lady enquires.

Waterhouse turns to look at her. Her gaze is darting back and forth around the front of his uniform, checking the insignia. Then she looks up into his face and gives him a grandmotherly smile.

Waterhouse realizes, in that instant, that this woman is a German spy. Holy cow!

"Only in peacetime, ma'am," he says. "The Navy has other uses, now, for men with good ears."

"Oh!" she exclaims, "you listen to things, do you?"

Waterhouse smiles. "Ping! Ping!" he says, mimicking sonar.

"Ah!" she says. "I am Harriett Qrtt." She holds out her hand.

"Hugh Hughes," Waterhouse says, and shakes.

"Pleasure.

"All mine.

"You'll be needing a place to stay, I suppose." She blushes ostentatiously. "Forgive me. I just assume you are bound for Outer." That's Outer, as in Outer Qwghlm. Right now, they are on Inner Qwghlm.

"Quite right, actually," Waterhouse says.

Like every other place name in the British Isles, Inner and Outer Qwghlm represent a gross misnomer with ancient and probably comical origins. Inner Qwghlm is hardly even an island; it is joined to the main land by a sandbar that used to come and go with the tides, but that has been beefed up with a causeway that carries a road and the railway line. Outer Qwghlm is twenty miles away.

"My husband and I operate a small bed and breakfast," Mrs. Qrtt says. "We should be honored to have an Asdic man stay with us." Asdic is simply the British acronym for what Yanks refer to as sonar, but every time the word is mentioned in the presence of Alan, he gets a naughty look on his face and goes on an unstoppable punning tear.

So he ends up at the Qrtt residence. Waterhouse and Mr. and Mrs. Qrtt spend the evening huddled round the only source of heat: a coal-burning toaster that has been bricked into the socket of an old fireplace. Every so often Mr. Qrtt opens the door and pelts the ashes with a mote of coal. Mrs. Qrtt ferries out the chow and spies on Waterhouse. She notices his slightly asymmetrical walk and manages to ferret out that he had a spot of polio at one point. He plays the organ-they have a pedal powered harmonium in the parlor-and she remarks on that.

Waterhouse first sees Outer Qwghlm through a scupper. He doesn't even know what a scupper is, except a modality of vomiting. The ferry crew gave him and the other half-dozen passengers detailed vomiting instructions before they fought past the Utter Maurby breakwater, the salient point being that if you leaned over the rail, you would almost certainly be swept overboard. Much better to get down on all fours and aim at a scupper. But half the time when Waterhouse peers down one of these, he sees not water but some distant point on the horizon, or seagulls chasing the ferry, or the distinctive three-pronged silhouette of Outer Qwghlm.

The prongs, called Sghrs, are basaltic columns. This being the middle of the Second World War, and Outer Qwghlm being the part of the British Isles closest to the action of the Battle of the Atlantic, they are now flecked with little white radio shacks and hairy with antennas. There is a fourth sghr, much lower than the others and easily mistaken for a mere hillock, that rises above Outer Qwghlm's only harbor (and, indeed, only settlement, not counting the naval base on the other side). On top of this fourth sghr is the castle that is the nominal home of Nigel St. John Gloamthorpby-Woadmire and that is to be the new headquarters of Detachment 2702.

Five minutes' walk encompasses the whole town. A furious rooster chases a feeble sheep down the main street. There is snow at the higher elevations, but just grey slush down here, which is indistinguishable from the grey cobblestones until you step on it and fall down on your ass. The Encyclopedia Qwghlmianahad made much use of the definite article-the Town, the Castle, the Hotel, the Pub, the Pier. Waterhouse stops in at the Shithouse to deal with some aftershocks of the sea voyage, and then walks up the Street. The Automobile pulls up alongside and offers him a ride; it turns out to be the Taxi, too. It takes him round the Park where he notices the Statue (ancient Qwghlmians thrashing hapless Vikings); this gesture that does not go unnoted by the Taxi Driver, who veers into the Park to give him a better look.

The Statue is the sort that has a great deal to say and covers a correspondingly large expanse of real estate. Its pedestal is a slab of native basalt, covered on at least one side with what Waterhouse recognizes, from the Encyclopedia,as Qwghlmian runes. To an ignorant philistine, these might look like an endless, random series of sans-serif Xs, Is, Vs, hyphens, asterisks, and upside-down Vs. But it is an enduring source of pride to-

"We didn't care for those Romans and that Julius Caesar fellow," observes the taxi driver, "and we weren't too taken with their alphabet either."

Indeed the Encyclopedia Qwghlmianafeatures a lengthy article about the local system of runes. The author of this article has such a chip on his shoulder that the thing is almost physically painful to read. The Qwghlmian practice of eschewing the use of curves and loops, forming all glyphs out of straight lines, far from being crude-as some English scholars have asserted-gives the script a limpid austerity. It is an admirably functional style of writing in a place where (after all the trees were cut down by the English) most of the literate intellectual class suffered from chronic bilateral frostbite.

Waterhouse has rolled down the window so that he can get a clearer view; apparently someone has lost the Squeegee. The chill breeze washing over his face finally begins to clear away his seasickness, to the point where he begins to wonder how he should go about making contact with the Whore.

Then he realizes, with some disappointment, that if the Whore has half a brain in her head, she's across the island at the naval base.

"Who's the wretch?" Waterhouse asks. He points to a corner of the statue, where a scrawny, downtrodden loser, with an iron collar welded around his neck and a chain dangling from that, quivers and quails at the carnage being meted out by the strapping Qwghlmian he-men. Waterhouse already knows the answer, but he can't resist asking.

"Hakh!" blurts the taxi driver, as if he is working up a loogie. "He is from Inner Qwghlm, I can only suppose."

"Of course."

This exchange seems to have put the driver into a foul and vengeful mood that can only be assuaged with some fast driving. There are a dozen or more switchbacks in the road up to the Castle, each one glazed with black ice and fraught with mortal danger. Waterhouse is glad he's not walking it, but the switchbacks and the skating motion of the taxi revive his motion sickness.

"Hakh!" the driver says, when they are about three-quarters of the way up, and nothing has been said for several minutes. "They practically laid out the welcome mat for the Romans. They spread their legs for the Vikings. There are probably Germans over there now!"

"Speaking of bile," Waterhouse says, "I need you to pull over. I'll walk from here."

The driver is startled and miffed, but he relents when Waterhouse explains that the alternative is a lengthy cleanup job. He even drives Duffel up to the top of the sghr and drops it off.

Detachment 2702 arrives at the Castle some fifteen minutes later in the person of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse USN, who is serving as the advance party. The walk gives him time to get his story straight, to get himself into character. Chattan has warned him that there will be servants, and that they will notice things, and that they will gossip. It would be much more convenient if the servants could simply be packed off to the mainland for the duration, but this would be a discourtesy to the duke. "You will," Chattan said, "have to work out a modus vivendi."Once Waterhouse had looked this term up, he agreed heartily.

The castle is a mound of rubble about the size of the Pentagon. The lee corner has been fitted out with a functional roof, electrical wiring, and a few other frills such as doors and windows. In this area, which is all Waterhouse gets to see for that first afternoon and evening, you can forget you are on Outer Qwghlm and pretend that you are in some greener and balmier place such as the Scottish Highlands.

The next morning, accompanied by the butler, Ghnxh, he strikes out into other parts of the building and is delighted to find that you can't even reach them without going outside; the internal connecting passages have been mortared shut to stanch the seasonal migrations of skrrghs (pronounced something like "skerries"), the frisky, bright-eyed, long-tailed mammals that are the mascot of the islands. This compartmentalization, while inconvenient, will be good for security.

Both Waterhouse and Ghnxh are encased in planklike wrappings of genuine Qwghlm wool, and the latter carries the GALVANICK LUCIPHER. The Galvanick Lucipher is of antique design. Ghnxh, who is about a hundred years old, can only smile in condescension at Waterhouse's U.S. Navy flashlight. In the sotto vocetones one might use to correct an enormous social gaffe, he explains that the galvanick lucipher is of such a superior design as to make any further reference to the Navy model a grating embarrassment for everyone concerned. He leads Waterhouse back to a special room behind the room behind the room behind the room behind the pantry, a room that exists solely for maintenance of the galvanick lucipher and the storage of its parts and supplies. The heart of the device is a hand-blown spherical glass jar comparable in volume to a gallon jug. Ghnxh, who suffers from a pretty advanced case of either hypothermia or Parkinson's, maneuvers a glass funnel into the neck of the jar. Then he wrestles a glass carboy from a shelf. The carboy, labeled AQUA REGIA, is filled with a fulminant orange liquid. He removes its glass stopper, hugs it, and heaves it over so that the orange fluid begins to glug out into the funnel and thence into the jar. Where it splashes out onto the tabletop, something very much like smoke curls up as it eats holes just like the thousands of other holes already there. The fumes get into Waterhouse's lungs; they are astoundingly corrosive. He staggers out of the room for a while.

When he ventures back, he finds Ghnxh whittling an electrode from an ingot of pure carbon. The jar of aqua regia has been capped off now, and a variety of anodes, cathodes, and other working substances are suspended in it, held in place by clamps of hammered gold. Thick wires, in insulating sheathes of hand-knit asbestos, twist out of the jar and into the business end of the galvanick lucipher: a copper salad bowl whose mouth is closed off by a Fresnel lens like the ones on a lighthouse. When Ghnxh gets his carbon whittled to just the right size and shape, he fits it into a little hatch in the side of this bowl, and casually throws a Frankensteinian blade switch. A spark pops across the contacts like a firecracker.

For a moment, Waterhouse thinks that one wall of the building has collapsed, exposing them to the direct light of the sun. But Ghnxh has simply turned on the galvanick lucipher, which soon becomes about ten times brighter, as Ghnxh adjusts a bronze thumbscrew. Crushed with shame, Waterhouse puts his Navy flashlight back into its prissy little belt holster, and precedes Ghnxh out of the room, the galvanick lucipher casting palpable warmth on the back of his neck. "We've got about two hours before she goes dead on us," Ghnxh says significantly.

They work out a modus vivendi,all right: Waterhouse kicks an old door open and then Ghnxh strides into the room that is on the other side and sweeps the beam of the lantern around as if it were a flame thrower, driving back dozens or hundreds of squealing skerries. Waterhouse clambers cautiously into the room, typically making his way over the collapsed remnants of whatever roof or story used to be overhead. He gives the place a quick inspection, trying to gauge how much effort would be required to make it liveable for any more advanced organism.

Half of the castle has, at one point or another, been burned down by a combination of Barbary corsairs, lightning bolts, Napoleon, and smoking in bed. The Barbary corsairs did the best job of it (probably just trying to stay warm), or maybe it's just that the elements have had longer to decompose what little was left behind by the flames. In any case, in that section of the castle, Waterhouse finds a place where there's not too much rubble to shovel out, and where they can quickly enclose an adequate space with a combination of tarps and planks. It is diametrically opposed to the part of the castle that is still inhabited, which exposes it to winter storms but protects it from the prying eyes of the staff. Waterhouse paces off some rough measurements, then goes to his room, leaving Ghnxh to see to the decommissioning of the galvanick lucipher.

Waterhouse sketches out some plans for the upcoming work, at long last putting his hitherto misspent engineering skills to some use. He draws up a bill of required materials, naturally involving a good many numbers:

100 8' 2 x 4s is a typical entry. He writes out the list a second time, in words not numbers: ONE HUNDRED EIGHT FOOT TWO BY FOURS. This wording is potentially confusing, so he changes it to TWO BY FOUR BOARDS ONE HUNDRED COUNT LENGTH EIGHT FEET.

Next he pulls a sheet of what looks like ledger paper, divided vertically into groups of five columns. Into these columns he transcribes the message, ignoring spaces:

TWOBY FOURB OARDS ONEHU NDRED

COUNT LENGT HEIGH TFEET

and so on. Wherever he encounters a letter J he writes I in its stead, so that JOIST comes out as IOIST. He only uses every third line of the page.

Ever since he left Bletchley Park, he has been carrying several sheets of onionskin paper around in his breast pocket; when he sleeps, he puts them under his pillow. Now he takes them out and selects one page, which has a serial number typed across the top and is otherwise covered with neatly typed letters like this:

ATHOP COGNQ DLTUI CAPRH MULEP

and so on, all the way down to the bottom of the page.

These sheets were typed up by a Mrs. Tenney, an aged vicar's wife who works at Bletchley Park. Mrs. Tenney has a peculiar job which consists of the following: she takes two sheets of onionskin paper and puts a sheet of carbon paper between them and rolls them into a typewriter. She types a serial number at the top. Then she turns the crank on a device used in bingo parlors, consisting of a spherical cage containing twenty-five wooden balls, each with a letter printed on it (the letter J is not used). After spinning the cage the exact number of times specified in the procedure manual, she closes her eyes, reaches through a hatch in the cage, and removes a ball at random. She reads the letter off the ball and types it, then replaces the ball, closes the hatch, and repeats the process. From time to time, serious-looking men come into the room, exchange pleasantries with her, and take away the sheets that she has produced. These sheets end up in the possession of men like Waterhouse, and men in infinitely more desperate and dangerous circumstances, all over the world. They are called one-time pads.

He copies the letters from the one-time pad into the empty lines beneath his message:

TWOBY FOURB OARDS ONEHU NDRED ATHOP COGNQ DLTUI CAPRH MULEP

When he is finished, two out of every three lines are occupied.

Finally, he returns to the top of the page one last time and begins to consider the letters two at a time. The first letter in the message is T. The first letter from the one-time pad, directly below it in the same column, is A.

A is the first letter in the alphabet and so Waterhouse, who has been doing this cipher stuff for much too long, thinks of it as being synonymous with the number 1. In the same way, T is equivalent to 19 if you are working in a J-less alphabet. Add 1 to 19 and you get 20, which is the letter U. So, in the first column beneath T and A, Waterhouse writes a U.

The next vertical pair is W and T, or 22 and 19, which in normal arithmetic add up to 41, which has no letter equivalent; it's too large. But it has been many years since Waterhouse did normal arithmetic. He has retrained his mind to work in modular arithmetic-specifically, modulo 25, which means that you divide everything by 25 and consider only the remainder.