"So?" Hatch said at last.
The old man looked at him inquiringly.
"So drop the other shoe," Hatch continued. "What do you think of this treasure hunt?"
The professor walked on for a minute, then stopped and turned toward Malin, lowering his arm as he did so. "Remember, you asked," he said.
Hatch nodded.
"I think you're a goddamned fool."
There was a moment of stunned surprise. He'd been prepared for Clay, but not for this. "What makes you say that?"
"You, of all the people on this earth, should know better. Whatever's down there, you won't get it out."
"Look, Dr. Horn, we've got technology those old treasure hunters never even dreamed of. Hardbody sonar, proton magnetometers, a photo-reconnaissance satellite downlink. We've got twenty million dollars in funding, and we even have the private journal of the man who designed the Pit." Hatch's voice had risen. He suddenly realized that it was very important for him to have this man's good opinion.
Dr. Horn shook his head. "Malin, for almost a century I've seen them come and go. Everyone had the latest equipment. Everyone had gobs of money. Everyone had some crucial piece of information, some brilliant insight. It was always going to be different. And they all ended up the same. Bankruptcy, misery, even death." He glanced at Hatch. "Have you found any treasure yet?"
"Well, not yet," Hatch said. "There's been one small problem. We knew that the Pit must have an underground flood tunnel leading to the sea, that's why it's always filled with water. We used dye to locate the flood tunnel's exit on the sea floor. Only, it seems there's not one flood tunnel, but five, and—"
"I see," Dr. Horn interrupted. "Just one small problem. I've heard that before, too. Maybe you'll solve your problem. Only then there will be another problem, and another, until you're all bankrupt. Or dead. Or both."
"But this will be different," Hatch cried. "You can't tell me it's impossible to raise the treasure. What man created, man can defeat."
The professor suddenly gripped Hatch's arm again. He had alarmingly strong hands, corded like ancient tree roots, sinewy and dry. "I knew your grandfather, Malin. He was a lot like you: young, smart as hell, promising career ahead of him, terrific enthusiasm for life. What you just said is exactly what he said to me, word for word, fifty years ago." He lowered his voice to a fierce whisper. "Look at the legacy he left your family. You asked my opinion. So here it is in a nutshell. Go back to Boston before history repeats itself."
He turned brusquely and hobbled off, his cane flicking irritably through the grass, until he had disappeared over the brow of the hill.
Chapter 18
The next morning, a little bleary-eyed from the beer of the previous day, Hatch closeted himself in the medical hut, laying out instruments and taking inventory. There had been a number of injuries over the last several days, but nothing more serious than a few scrapes and a cracked rib. As he moved through his shelves, checking against a printed master list, he could hear the monotonous hiss of surf from the nearby reefs. The sun struggled wanly through the metal-sided window, attenuated by the omnipresent curtain of mist.
Finishing the inventory, Hatch hung his clipboard beside the shelves and glanced out the window. He could see the tall, slope-shouldered form of Christopher St. John, walking gingerly over the rough ground of Base Camp. The Englishman dodged a heavy cable and a length of PVC pipe, then ducked into Wopner's quarters, his unruly gray hair barely clearing the door frame. Hatch stood for a moment, then picked up the two black binders and exited the medical office, following the historian. Maybe there was some progress to report on the code.
Wopner's Base Camp office was, if anything, even more messy than his stateroom on the Cerberus. Small to begin with, banks of monitoring and servo control equipment made it claustrophobic. Wopner occupied the office's lone chair, crammed into a far corner by the relay racks that surrounded him. Cold air was blasting from two ducts overhead, and a massive air conditioner grumbled on the far side of the wall.
Despite the air-conditioning, the room was stuffy with hot electronics, and as Hatch walked in St. John was looking for a place to hang his jacket. His search unsuccessful, he laid it carefully on a nearby console.
"Jeez," said Wopner, "you lay your hairy old tweed there and it's gonna short-circuit the whole works."
Frowning, St. John picked it up again. "Kerry, do you have a minute?" he said. "We really need to discuss this problem with the code."
"Do I look like I have a minute?" came the response. Wopner leaned away from his terminal with a glare. "I've just now finished an all-island diagnostic. The whole ball of wax, right down to the microcode. Took an hour, even at maximum bandwidth. Everything checks out: pumps, compressors, servos, you name it. No problems or discrepancies of any kind."
"That's great," Hatch broke in.
Wopner looked at him incredulously. "Grow a brain, willya? Great? It's frigging terrible!"
"I don't understand."
"We had a system crash, remember? The goddamn pumps went south on us. Afterward, I compared the island computer system with Scylla over on the Cerberus, and guess what? The ROM chips on Charbydis, here, had been altered. Altered!" He angrily smacked one of the CPUs upside its cabinet.
"And?"
"And now I run the diagnostics again, and everything's fine. Not only that, but the entire grid shows no deviations of any kind." Wopner leaned forward. "No deviations. Don't you get it? That's A physical and computational impossibility."
St. John was glancing at the equipment around him, hands tucked behind his back. "Ghost in the machine, Kerry?" he ventured.
Wopner ignored this.
"I don't know much about computers," St. John continued, his plummy accent filling the air, "but I do know one term: GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out."
"Bite me. It's not the programming."
"Ah. I see. Couldn't possibly be human error. As I recall, all it took was one incorrect FORTRAN equation to send Mariner 1 off on some outer space scavenger hunt, never to be heard from again."
"The point is, things are working now," Hatch said. "So why not move on?"
"Sure, and have it happen again. I want to know why all this shit failed at once."
"You can't do anything about it now," St. John said. "Meanwhile, we're falling behind schedule on the cryptanalysis. Nothing's worked. I've done some more research, and I think we've been far too quick to dismiss—"
"Shit on a stick!" Wopner snapped, wheeling toward him. "You're not going to start mumbling about polyalphabetics again, are you, old thing? Look, I'm going to modify the algorithm of my brute-force attack, give it fifty percent system priority, really get things moving. Why don't you retire to your library? Come back at the end of the day with some useful ideas."
St. John looked briefly at Wopner. Then he shrugged into his tweed and ducked back out into the gauzy morning light. Hatch followed him to his own office.
"Thanks," Hatch said, passing the two folders to St. John.
"He's right, you know," the historian said, taking a seat at his tidy desk and wearily pulling the old typewriter toward him. "It's just that I've tried everything else. I've based my attacks on all the encryption methods known during Macallan's time. I've approached it as an arithmetic problem, as an astronomic or astro-logic system, as a foreign language code. Nothing."
"What are polyalphabetics?" Hatch asked.
St. John sighed. "A polyalphabetic cipher. It's quite simple, really. You see, most codes in Macallan's day were simple, monophonic substitutions. You had the regular alphabet, then you had a cipher alphabet, all higgledy-piggledy. To encode something, you simply looked up which cipher letter matched the next regular letter in your document. Maybe the code for s was y, and the code for e was z. So, when you coded the word 'see,' you'd get 'yzz.' That's how the cryptograms in your local newspaper work."