Cryptonomicon

Chapter 22 ELECTRICAL TILL CORPORATION

As evidence of the allies' slowly developing plan to kill the Axis by smothering them under a mountain of manufactured goods, there's this one pier in Sydney Harbor that is piled high with wooden crates and steel barrels: stuff that has been disgorged from the holds of ships from America, Britain, India and just left to sit there because Australia doesn't know how to digest it yet. It is not the only pier in Sydney that is choked with stuff. But because this pier isn't good for much else, it is mounded higher and the stuff is older, rustier, more infested with rats, more rimed with salt, more thickly frosted and flagrantly streaked with gull shit.

A man is picking his way over the pile, trying not to get any more of that gull shit on his khakis. He is wearing the uniform of a major in the United States Army and is badly encumbered by a briefcase. His name is Comstock.

Inside the briefcase are various identity papers, credentials, and an impressive letter from the office of The General in Brisbane. Comstock has had occasion to show all of the above to the doddering and yet queerly formidable Australian guards who, with their doughboy helmets and rifles, infest the waterfront. These men do not speak any dialect of the English language that the major can recognize and vice versa, but they can all read what is on those papers.

The sun is going down and the rats are waking up. The major has been clambering over docks all day long. He has seen enough of war and the military to know that what he is looking for will be found on the last pier that he searches, which happens to be this one. If he begins searching that pier at the near end, what he is looking for will be at the far end, and vice versa. All the more reason to stay sharp as he works his way along. After casting an eye around to make sure there are no leaking stacks of drums of aviation fuel nearby, he lights up a cigarette. War is hell, but smoking cigarettes makes it all worthwhile.

Sydney Harbor is beautiful at sunset, but he's been looking at it all day and can't really see it anymore. For lack of anything better to do, he opens up his briefcase. There's a paperback novel in there, which he's already read. And there is a clipboard which contains, in yellowed, crackling, sedimentary layers, a fossil record that only an archaeologist could unravel. It is the story of how The General, just after he got out of Corregidor and reached Australia in April, sent out a request for some stuff. How that request got forwarded to America and bounced pinball-like through the cluttered infinitude of America's military and civilian bureaucracies; how the stuff in question was duly manufactured, procured, trucked hither and yon, and caused to be placed on a ship; and finally, some evidence to the effect that said ship was in Sydney Harbor several months ago. There's no evidence that this ship ever unloaded the stuff in question, but unloading stuff is what ships always do when they reach port and so Comstock is going with that assumption for a while.

After Major Comstock finishes his cigarette, he resumes his search. Some of the papers on his clipboard specify certain magic numbers that ought to be stenciled on the outside of the crates in question; at least, that's what he's been assuming since he started this search at daybreak, and if he's wrong, he'll have to go back and search every crate in Sydney Harbor again. Actually getting a look at each crates' numbers means squeezing his body through narrow channels between crate piles and rubbing away the grease and grime that obscures the crucial data. The major is now as filthy as any combat grunt.

When he gets close to the end of the pier, his eye picks out one cluster of crates that appear to be all of the same vintage insofar as their salt encrustations are of similar thickness. Down low where the rain pools, their rough-sawn wood has rotted. Up where it is roasted by the sun, it has warped and split. Somewhere these crates must have numbers stenciled onto them, but something else has caught his eye, something that stirs Comstock's heart, just as the sight of the Stars and Stripes fluttering in the morning sun might do for a beleaguered infantryman. Those crates are proudly marked with the initials of the company that Major Comstock (and most of his comrades-in-arms up in Brisbane) worked for, before they were shunted, en masse, into the Army's Signal Intelligence Service. The letters are faded and grimy, but he would recognize them anywhere in the world: they form the logo, the corporate identity, the masthead, of ETC—the Electrical Till Corporation.