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Cryptonomicon

ModernLib.Net / Киберпанк / Стивенсон Нил / Cryptonomicon - Чтение (стр. 41)
Автор: Стивенсон Нил
Жанр: Киберпанк

 

 


Randy puts the page into his breast pocket and begins planning a trip to California.

Most of the ballroom dancing freaks in this town belong to the social class that can afford cars and drivers. The cars are lined up all the way down the hotel's drive and out into the street, waiting to discharge their passengers, whose bright gowns are visible even through tinted windows. Attendants blow whistles and gesture with their white gloves, vectoring cars into the parking lot, where they are sintered into a tight mosaic. Some of the drivers don't even bother getting out, and lean their seats back for a nap. Others gather beneath a tree at one end of the lot to smoke, joke, and shake their heads in dazed amusement at the world in the way that only your hardened future shocked Third Worlders can.

Since he has been dreading this so much, you'd think Randy might just sit back and savor the delay. But, like jerking a bandage off a hairy part of the body, it is a deed best done quickly and suddenly. As they pull to a stop at the back of the line of limos, he shoves money at his surprised driver, opens the door, and walks the last block to the hotel. He can feel the eyes of the gowned and perfumed Filipinas playing across his husky back like laser sights on commandos' rifles.

Aging Filipinas in prom dresses have come and gone across the lobby of the Manila Hotel for as long as Randy has known the place. He hardly noticed them during the early months when he was actually living there. The first time they appeared, he assumed that some function was underway in the grand ballroom: perhaps a wedding, perhaps a class-action suit being filed by aging beauty contest contestants against the synthetic fibers industry. That was about as far as he got before he stopped burning out his mental circuits trying to figure everything out. Pursuing an explanation for every strange thing you see in the Philippines is like trying to get every last bit of rainwater out of a discarded tire.

The Shaftoes are not waiting by the door to tell him it was all a joke, so Randy squares his shoulders and stomps doggedly across the vast lobby, all alone, like a Confederate infantryman in Pickett's Charge, the last man of his regiment. A photographer in a Ronald Reagan pompadour and a white tuxedo is planted before the door to the grand ballroom, shooting pictures of people on the way in, hoping that they will pay for copies on the way out. Randy shoots him such a fell look that the man's shutter finger cringes back from the button. Then it's through the big doors and into the ballroom, where, beneath swirling, colored lights, hundreds of Filipinas are dancing, mostly with much younger men, to the strains of a reprocessed Carpenters tune generated by a small orchestra in the corner. Randy shells out some pesos for a corsage of sampaguita flowers. Holding it at arm's length so that he will not be plunged into a diabetic coma by its fumes, he commences a Magellanian circumnavigation of the dance floor, which is surrounded by an atoll of round tables that are adorned with white linen tablecloths, candles, and glass ashtrays. A man with a thin mustache sits alone at one of those tables, back against the wall, a cellphone against his head, one side of his face illuminated fluoroscopically by the eerie green light of its keypad. A cigarette juts from his fist.

Grandma Waterhouse insisted that seven-year-old Randy take ballroom dance lessons because one day it would certainly come in handy. He begged to differ. Her Australian accent had turned lofty and English in the decades since she had come to America, or maybe that was his imagination. She sat there, bolt upright as always, on her floral-chintz Gomer Bolstrood settee, the sere hills of the Palouse visible through lace curtains behind her, sipping tea from a white china cup decorated with-was it lavender roses? When she tilted the cup back, seven-year-old Randy must have been able to read the name of the china pattern off the bottom. The information must be stored in his subconscious memory somewhere. Perhaps a hypnotist could extract it.

But seven-year-old Randy had other things on his mind: protesting, in the strongest possible terms, the assertion that ballroom dance skills could ever be of any use. At the same time, he was being patterned. Implausible, even ludicrous ideas were suffusing his brain, invisible and odorless as carbon monoxide gas: that the Palouse was a normal landscape. That the sky was this blue everywhere. That a house should look this way: with lace curtains, leaded-glass windows, and room after room full of Gomer Bolstrood furniture.

"I met your grandfather Lawrence at a dance, in Brisbane," Grandma announced. She was trying to tell him that he, Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, would not even exist had it not been for the practice of ballroom dancing. But Randy did not even know where babies came from yet and probably wouldn't have understood even if he did. Randy straightened up, remembering his posture, and asked her a question: did this encounter in Brisbane happen when she was seven years old, or, perhaps, a little later?

Perhaps if she had lived in a mobile home, the grown-up Randy would have sunk his money into a mutual fund, instead of paying ten thousand dollars to a soi-disantartisan from San Francisco to install leaded-glass windows around his front door, like at Grandma's house.

He provides tremendous, long-lasting amusement to the Shaftoes by walking right past their table without recognizing them. He looks right at Doug Shaftoe's date, a striking Filipina, probably in her forties, who is in the middle of making some forceful point. Without taking her eyes off Doug and Amy Shaftoe, she reaches out with one long graceful arm and snags Randy's wrist as he goes by, yanking him back like a dog on a meat leash. She then holds him there while she finishes her sentence, then looks up at him with a brilliant smile. Randy smiles back dutifully, but he does not give her the full attention she seems accustomed to, because he is a bit preoccupied by the spectacle of America Shaftoe in a dress.

Fortunately, Amy has not gone in for the prom queen look. She is wearing a form-fitting black number with long sleeves that hide her tattoos, and black tights, as opposed to stockings. Randy gives her the flowers, like a quarterback handing off the pigskin to a runner. She accepts them with a crooked expression, like a wounded soldier biting down on a bullet. Irony aside, she has a gleam in her eye that he has never seen before. Or maybe that is just light from the mirrored ball, reflecting off cigarette-smoke-induced tears. He senses in his gut that he did the right thing by showing up. As with all gut feelings, only time will tell whether this it is pathetic self-delusion. He was kind of afraid that she would go through some Hollywoodesque transfiguration into a radiant goddess, which would have the same effect on Randy as an ax to the base of the skull. The fact of the matter is that she looks quite good, but arguably, just as out of place as Randy is in his suit.

He is hoping that they can get the dancing over right away so that he can flee the building in Cinderellan obloquy, but they bid him sit down. The orchestra takes a break and the dancers return to their tables. Doug Shaftoe is comfortably sprawled back in his chair with the masculine confidence of a man who has not only killed people but who is, furthermore, escorting the most beautiful woman in the room. Her name is Aurora Taal, and she casts her flawlessly Lancomed gaze over the other Filipinas with the controlled amusement of one who has lived in Boston, Washington, and London, and seen it all, and come back to live in Manila anyway.

"So, did you learn anything more about this Rudolf von Hacklheber character?" Doug asks, after a few minutes of small talk. It follows that Aurora must be in on the whole secret. Doug mentioned, weeks ago, that a small number of Filipinos knew about what they were doing, and that they could be trusted.

"He was a mathematician. He was from a wealthy Leipzig family. He was at Princeton before the war. His years there did, in fact, overlap with my grandfather's."

"What kind of math did he do, Randy?"

"Before the war he did number theory. Which tells us nothing about what he did during the war. It wouldn't be surprising if he'd ended up working in the Third Reich's crypto apparatus."

"Which wouldn't explain how he ended up here."

Randy shrugs. "Maybe he did engineering work on the new generation of submarines. I don't know."

"So the Reich got him involved in some kind of classified work, which killed him eventually," Doug says. "We could have guessed that for ourselves, I suppose."

"Why did you mention crypto, then?" Amy asks. She has some kind of emotional metal detector that screams whenever it comes near buried assumptions and hastily stifled impulses.

"I guess I have crypto on the brain. And, if there was some kind of connection between von Hacklheber and my grandfather-"

"Was your grandfather a crypto guy, Randy?" Doug asks.

"He never said anything about what he did during the war."

"Classic."

"But he had this trunk up in the attic. A war souvenir. It actually reminds me of a trunk full of Nipponese crypto materials that I recently saw in a cave in Kinakuta." Doug and Amy stare at him. "It doesn't amount to anything, probably," Randy concedes.

The orchestra starts in with a Sinatra tune. Doug and Aurora smile at each other and rise to their feet. Amy rolls her eyes and looks the other way, but it's put up or shut up time now, and Randy cannot conceive of any way out. He stands up and extends his hand to the one he fears and hopes for, and she, without looking, reaches out and puts her hand into his.

Randy shuffles, which is no way to dance beautifully but does rule out snapping his partner's metatarsals. Amy is essentially no better at this than he is, but she has a better attitude. By the time they get to the end of the first dance, Randy has at least reached the point where his face is no longer burning, and has gone for some thirty seconds without having to apologize for anything, and sixty without asking his partner whether she will be needing medical attention. Then the song is over, and circumstances dictate that he has to dance with Aurora Taal. This is less intimidating; even though she is glamorous and a really good dancer, their relationship is not one that allows for the possibility of grotesque pre-erotic fumbling. Also, Aurora smiles a lot, and she has a really spectacular smile, where Amy's face was intense and preoccupied. The next dance is announced as ladies' choice, and Randy is still trying to make eye contact with Amy when he finds this tiny middle-aged Filipina standing there asking Aurora if she would mind terribly. Aurora consigns him to the other lady like a pork belly futures contract on the commodity exchange, and suddenly Randy and the lady are dancing the Texas two-step to the strains of a pre-disco Bee Gees tune.

"So, have you found wealth in the Philippines yet?" asks the lady, whose name Randy did not quite catch. She acts as if she expects him to know her.

"Uh, my partners and I are exploring business opportunities," Randy says. "Maybe wealth will follow."

"I understand you are good with numbers," the lady says.

Randy is really racking his brain now. How does this woman know he's a numbers kind of guy? "I'm good with math,"he finally says.

"Isn't that what I said?"

"Nah, mathematicians stay away from actual, specific numbers as much as possible. We like to talk about numbers without actually exposing ourselves to them-that's what computers are for."

The lady will not be denied; she has a script and she's sticking to it. "I have a math problem for you," the lady says.

"Shoot."

"What is the value of the following information: fifteen degrees, seventeen minutes, forty-one point three two seconds north, and a hundred and twenty-one degrees, fifty-seven minutes, zero point five five seconds east?"

"Uh. . . I don't know. It sounds like a latitude and longitude. Northern Luzon, right?"

The lady nods.

"You want me to tell you the value of those numbers?"

"Yes."

"Depends on what's there, I guess."

"I suppose it does," the lady says. And that's all she says, for the rest of the dance. Other than complimenting Randy on his balletic skills, which is just as hard to interpret.

Chapter 57 GIRL

Flats are harder and harder to find in Brisbane, which has become a spy boomtown-Bletchley Park Down Under. There's Central Bureau, which has set up out at the Ascot Racetrack, and another entity in a different part of town called Allied Intelligence Bureau. The people who work at Central Bureau tend to be pallid mathematics experts. The AIB people, on the other hand, remind Waterhouse very much of those Detachment 2702 fellows: tense, tanned, and taciturn.

Half a mile from the Ascot Racetrack, he sees one of the latter tripping lightly down the steps of a nice gingerbready rooming-house, carrying a five-hundred-pound duffel bag on his back. The man is dressed for a long trip. A grandmotherish lady in an apron is on the veranda, waving a tea towel at him. It is like a scene from a movie; you wouldn't even know that only a few hours' flight from here, men are turning black like photographic paper in a developer tray as their living flesh is converted into putrid gas by Clostridium bacteria.

Waterhouse does not stop to estimate the probability that he, who needs a place to live, should happen along at the exact moment that a room has become available. Cryptanalysts wait for lucky breaks, then exploit them. After the departing soldier has disappeared round the corner, he knocks on the door and introduces himself to the lady. Mrs. McTeague says (to the extent Waterhouse can penetrate her accent) that she likes his looks. She sounds distinctly astonished. It seems clear that the improbability of Waterhouse's having happened upon this vacant room is nothing compared to the improbability of having his looks liked by Mrs. McTeague. Thus, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse joins a small elite group of young men (four in all) whose looks Mrs. McTeague likes. They sleep, two to a room, in the bedrooms where Mrs. McTeague's offspring grew from the brightest and most beautiful children ever born into the finest adults who walk the earth except for the King of England, the General, and Lord Mountbatten.

Waterhouse's new roommate is out of town just now, but by glancing over his personal effects, Waterhouse estimates that he is paddling a black kayak from Australia to Yokosuka Naval Base, where he will slip on board a battleship and silently kill its entire crew with his bare hands before doing an Olympic-qualifying dive into the bay, punching out a few sharks, climbing back into his kayak and paddling back to Australia for a beer.

The next morning, at breakfast, he meets the fellows in the next room: a redheaded British naval officer who shows all the earmarks of working at Central Bureau, and a fellow named Hale, whose nationality cannot be pegged because he's not in uniform and he's too hung over to speak.

Having accomplished his mission (according to his understanding with the General's minions), found a place to live, and settled his other personal affairs, Waterhouse begins hanging around the Ascot Racetrack and the adjacent whorehouse, trying to find some way to make himself useful. Actually he would rather sit in his room all day and work on his new project, which is to design a high-speed Turing machine. But he has a duty to contribute to the war effort. Even if he didn't, he suspects that when his new roommate gets back from his mission, and finds him sitting indoors all day drawing circuit diagrams, he will thrash Waterhouse to the point where Mrs. McTeague will no longer like his looks.

To put it mildly, Central Bureau is not the kind of place where a stranger can just wander in, check the place out, introduce himself and find a job. Even the wandering-in part is potentially fatal. Fortunately, Waterhouse has Ultra Mega clearance, the highest clearance in the Entire World.

Unfortunately, this category of secrecy is itself so secret that its very existence is secret, and so he can't actually reveal it to anyone-unless he finds someone else with Ultra Mega clearance. There are only a dozen people with Ultra Mega clearance in all of Brisbane. Eight of them comprise the top of the General's command hierarchy, three work at Central Bureau, and one is Waterhouse.

Waterhouse sniffs out the nerve center in the old whorehouse. Superannuated Australian Territorial Guards in jaunty asymmetrical hats ring the place, clutching blunderbusses. Unlike Mrs. McTeague, they don't like his looks. On the other hand they are used to this kind of thing: smart boys from far away showing up at the gate with long and, in the end, boring stories about how the military screwed up their orders, put them in the wrong boat, sent them to the wrong place, gave them tropical diseases, threw their belongings overboard, left them to fend for themselves. They don't shoot him, but they don't let him in.

He hangs around and makes a nuisance of himself for a couple of days until he finally recognizes, and is recognized by, Abraham Sinkov. Sinkov is a top American cryptanalyst; he helped Schoen break Indigo. He and Waterhouse have crossed paths a few times, and though they aren't friends, per se, their minds work the same way. This makes them brothers in a weird family that has only a few hundred members, scattered about the world. In a way, it is a clearance that is rarer, harder to come by, and more mysterious than Ultra Mega. Sinkov writes him a new set of papers, giving him a clearance that is very high, but not so high that he can't reveal it.

Waterhouse gets a tour. Shirtless men sit in Quonset huts made stifling by the red-hot tubes of their radios. They pluck the Nipponese Army's messages out of the air and hand them off to legions of young Australian women who punch the intercepted messages onto ETC cards.

There is a cadre of American officers composed entirely of a whole department of the Electrical Till Corporation. One day, early in 1942, they put their white shirts and blue suits into mothballs, donned Army uniforms, and climbed on ships to Brisbane. Their ringleader is a guy named Lieutenant Colonel Comstock, and he has gotten the whole code-breaking process totally automated. The cards punched by the Aussie girls come into the machine room stacked into ingots which are fed through the machines. Decrypts fly out of a line printer on the other end and are taken off to another hut where American nisei, and some white men trained in Nipponese, translate them.

A Waterhouse is the last thing these guys need. He's beginning to understand what the major said to him the other day: they have passed over the watershed line. The codes are broken.

Which reminds him of Turing. Ever since Alan got back from New York he's been distancing himself from Bletchley Park. He has moved up to another installation, a radio center called Hanslope in north Buckinghamshire, a place of reinforced concrete, wires, antennas, more military-formal in its atmosphere.

At the time, Waterhouse could not understand why Alan would want to move away from Bletchley. But now he knows how Alan must have felt after they turned decryption into a mechanical process, industrializing Bletchley Park. He must have felt that the battle was won, and with it the war. The rest might seem like glorious conquest to people like the General, but to Turing, and now to Waterhouse, it just looks like tedious mopping-up. It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.

Sinkov provides Waterhouse with a desk in the whorehouse and begins to feed him the messages that Central Bureau hasn't been able to decrypt. There are still dozens of minor Nipponese codes that remain to be broken. Maybe, by breaking one or two, and teaching the ETC machines to read them, Waterhouse can shorten the war by a single day, or save a single life. This is a noble calling that he undertakes willingly, but in essence it is no different from being an Army butcher who saves lives by keeping his knives clean, or a lifeboat inspector in the Navy.

Waterhouse cracks those minor Nip codes one after the other. One month he even flies up to New Guinea, where Navy divers are salvaging code books from a sunken Nip submarine. He lives in the jungle for two weeks and tries not to die, comes back to Brisbane, and puts those recovered codebooks to good but dull use. Then one day the dullness of his work becomes irrelevant.

On that day, he returns to Mrs. McTeague's boardinghouse in the evening, goes to his room, and finds a large man snoring in the upper bunk. A lot of clothing and equipment is scattered about the place, emanating sulfurous reek.

The man sleeps for two days and then comes down late for breakfast one morning, peering around the room with Atabrine yellow eyes. He introduces himself as Smith. His oddly familiar accent is not made any easier to understand by the fact that his teeth are chattering violently. He doesn't seem especially bothered by this. He sits down and paws an Irish linen napkin into his lap with a hand that is stiff and raw. Mrs. McTeague fusses over him to the extent that all of the men at the table must resist the impulse to slug her. She pours him tea with plenty of milk and sugar. He takes a few sips, then excuses himself and goes to the WC, where he crisply and politely vomits. He comes back, eats a soft-boiled egg from a bone china egg cup, turns green, leans back in his chair, and closes his eyes for about ten minutes.

When Waterhouse returns from work that evening, he blunders into the parlor and interrupts Mrs. McTeague having tea with a young lady.

The young lady's name is Mary Smith; she is the cousin of Waterhouse's roommate, who is upstairs shivering and sweating in his bunk bed.

Mary stands up to be introduced, which is not technically necessary; but she is a girl from the outback and has no use for effete refinement. She is a petite girl dressed in a uniform.

She is the only woman Waterhouse has ever seen. She is the only other human being in the universe actually, and when she stands up to shake his hand, his peripheral vision shuts down as if he has been sucking on a tailpipe. Black curtains converge across a silver cyclorama, shuttering down his cosmos to a vertical shaft of carbon-arc glory, a pillar of light, a heavenly follow-spot targeted upon Her.

Mrs. McTeague, knowing the score, bids him sit down.

Mary is a tiny, white-skinned, red-headed person who is often seized by little fits of self-consciousness. When this happens she averts her eyes from his and swallows, and when she swallows there is a certain cord in her white neck, rounding the concavity from shoulder to ear, that stands out for a moment. It draws attention both to her vulnerability and to the white flesh of her neck, which is not white in a pallid sick way but in another way that Waterhouse could never have understood until recently: viz., from his little stint in New Guinea, where everything is either dead and decaying, or bright and threatening, or unobtrusive and invisible, Waterhouse knows that anything this tender and translucent is too vulnerable and tempting to hold its own in a world of violently competing destroyers, that it can only be sustained for a moment (let alone years) by the life force within. In the South Pacific where the forces of Death are so powerful, it leaves him vaguely intimidated. Her skin, as unmarked as clear water, is an extravagant display of vibrant animal power. He wants his tongue on it. The whole curve of her neck, from collarbone to earlobe, would make a perfect cradle for his face.

She sees him looking at her, and swallows again. The cord flexes, stretching the living skin of her neck out for just a moment, and then relaxes, leaving nothing but smoothness and calm. She may just as well have caved his head in with a stone and tied his penis round a hitching-rail. The effect must be calculated. But apparently she has not ever done it to anyone else, or there would be a band of gold round her pale left ring finger.

Mary Smith is beginning to get annoyed with him. She lifts the teacup to her lips. She has turned so that the light is grazing her neck in a new way, and this time when she swallows he can see her Adam's apple moving up. Then it comes down like a pile driver on what is left of his good judgment.

There is a thumping noise upstairs; her cousin has just regained consciousness. "Excuse me," she says, and she's gone, leaving only Mrs. McTeague's bone china as a reminder.

Chapter 58 CONSPIRACY

Dr. Rudolf Von Hacklheber is not much older than sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, but even emotionally crushed, he has a certain bearing about him that men in Shaftoe's world don't acquire until they are in their forties, if then. His eyeglasses have tiny rimless lenses that look like they were scavenged from a sniper's telescopic sights. Behind them is a whole paintbox of vivid colors: blond lashes, blue eyes, red veins, lids swollen and purple from weeping. Even so, he has a perfect shave, and the silvery Nordic light coming in through the tiny windows of Enoch Root's church cellar glances from the planes of his face so as to highlight an interesting terrain of big pores, premature creases, and old dueling scars. He has tried to grease his hair back, but it misbehaves and keeps tumbling down over his brow. He is wearing a white dress shirt and a very long, heavy overcoat on top of that to ward off the cellar's chill. Shaftoe, who hiked back to Norrsbruck with him several days ago, knows that the long-legged von Hacklheber has the makings of a half-decent jock. But he can tell that rude sports like football would be out of the question; this Kraut would be a fencer or a mountain climber or a skier.

Shaftoe was only startled-not bothered-by von Hacklheber's homosexuality. Some of the China Marines in Shanghai had a lot more young Chinese boys hanging around their flats than they really needed to shine their boots-and Shanghai is far from the strangest or most far-flung place where Marines made themselves at home between the wars. You can worry about morality when you're off duty, but if you are always stewing and fretting over what the other guys are doing in the sack, then what the hell are you going to do when you're presented with an opportunity to hit a Nip squad with a flamethrower?

They buried the remains of Angelo, the pilot, two weeks ago, and only now is von Hacklheber feeling in any kind of shape to talk. He has rented a cottage outside of town, but he has come into Norrsbruck to meet with Root, Shaftoe, and Bischoff on this day, partly because he is convinced that German spies are watching it. Shaftoe shows up with a bottle of Finnish schnapps, Bischoff brings a loaf of bread, Root breaks out a tin of fish. Von Hacklheber brings information. Everyone brings cigarettes.

Shaftoe smokes early and often, trying to kill the mildewy smell of the cellar, which reminds him of being locked up there with Enoch Root, kicking his morphine habit. During that time, the pastor once had to come downstairs and ask him please to stop screaming for a while because they were trying to do a wedding upstairs. Shaftoe hadn't known he was screaming.

Rudolf von Hacklheber's English is, in some respects, better than Shaftoe's. He sounds unnervingly like Bobby's junior high school drafting teacher, Mr. Jaeger. "Before the war I worked under DReferatIva of GruppeIV, Analytical Cryptanalysis, which was part of HauptgruppeB, Cryptanalysis, which reported ultimately to Major General Erich Feilgiebel, Chief of Wehrmachtnachrichtungen verbindungen."

Shaftoe looks around at the others, but none of them laughs, or even grins. They must not have heard it. "Come again?" Shaftoe asks, proddingly, like a man in a bar trying to get a shy friend to tell a sure-fire thigh-slapper.

"Wehrmachtnachrichtungenverbindungen," von Hacklheber says, very slowly, as if repeating nursery rhymes to a toddler. He blinks once, twice, three times at Shaftoe, then sits forward and says, brightly: "Perhaps I should explain the organization of the German intelligence hierarchy, since it will help you all to understand my story."

A BRIEF TRIP INTO HELL'S DEMO with HERR DOKTOR PROFESSOR RUDOLF VON HACKLHEBER ensues.

Shaftoe only hears the first couple of sentences. At about the point when von Hacklheber tears a sheet out of a notebook and begins to diagram the organizational tree of the Thousand-Year Reich, with "Der F

Shaftoe is not (though he should be) dead, and so this is not hell. It is closely modeled after hell, though. It is like a mock-up slapped together from tar paper and canvas, like the fake towns where they practiced house-to-house warfare during boot camp. Shaftoe is gripped with a sort of giddy queasiness that, he knows, is the most pleasant thing he will feel here. "Morphine takes away the body's ability to experience pleasure," says the booming voice of Enoch Root, his wry, annoying Virgil, who for purposes of this nightmare has adopted the voice and physical shape of Moe, the mean, dark-haired Stooge. "It may be some time before you feel physically well."

The organizational tree of this nightmare begins, like von Hacklheber's, with Der F

The voice of Mr. Jaeger, his drafting teacher-the most boring man Shaftoe had ever known, until perhaps today-fades in for a moment with the words, "but all of the organizational structures I have detailed to this point became obsolete at the outbreak of hostilities.


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