Cryptonomicon

Randy has a different set of motives, and so he stays there late, going through pictures by himself. Ninety-nine out of a hundred are snapshots of Waterhouse brats from the 1950s. But some are older. He finds a photo of Grandpa in a place with palm trees, in a military uniform, with a big white disk-shaped officer's cap on his head. Three hours later he comes across a picture of a very young Grandpa, really just a turkey-necked adolescent costumed in grownup clothes, standing in front of a gothic building with two other men: a grinning dark-haired chap who looks vaguely familiar, and an aquiline blond fellow in rimless glasses. All three men have bicycles; Grandpa is straddling his, and the other two, perhaps considering this to be not so dignified, are supporting theirs with their hands. Another hour goes by, and then there's Grandpa in a khaki uniform with more palm trees in the background.

The next morning he sits down next to his grandmother, after she has finished her daily hourlong getting-out-of-bed ritual. "Grandmother, I found these two old photographs." He deals them out on the table in front of her and gives her a few moments to switch contexts. Grandma doesn't turn on a dime conversationally, and besides, those stiff old-lady corneas take a little while to shift focus.

"Yes, these are both Lawrence when he was in the service." Grandmother has always had this knack for telling people the obvious in a way that is scrupulously polite but that makes the recipient feel like a butthead for having wasted her time. By this point she is obviously tired of IDing photographs, a tedious job with an obvious subtext of "you're going to die soon and we were curious--who is this lady standing next to the Buick?"

"Grandmother," Randy says brightly, trying to rouse her interest, "in this photo here, he is wearing a Navy uniform. And in this photo here, he is wearing an Army uniform."

Grandma Waterhouse raises her eyebrows and looks at him with the synthetic interest she would use if she were at a formal affair of some kind, and some man she'd just met tried to give her a tutorial on tire-changing.

"It is, uh, I think, kind of unusual," Randy says, "for a man to be in both the Army and the Navy during the same war. Usually it's one or the other."

"Lawrence had both an Army uniform and a Navy uniform," Grandmother says, in the same tone she'd used to say he had both a small intestine and a large intestine, "and he would wear whichever one was appropriate."

"Of course he would," Randy says.

***

The laminar wind is gliding over the highway like a crisp sheet being stripped from a bed, and Randy's finding it hard to keep the Acura on the pavement. The wind isn't strong enough to blow the car around, but it obscures the edges of the road; all he can see is this white, striated plane sliding laterally beneath him. His eye tells him to steer into it, which would be a bad idea since it would take him and Amy straight into the lava fields. He tries to focus on a distant point: the white diamond of Mount Rainier, a couple of hundred kilometers west.

"I don't even know when they got married," Randy says. "Isn't that horrible?"

"September of 1945," Amy says. "I dragged it out of her."

"Wow."

"Girl talk."

"I didn't know you were even rigged for girl talk."

"We can all do it."

"Did you learn anything else about the wedding? Like--"

"The china pattern?"

"Yeah."

"It was in fact Lavender Rose," Amy says.

"So it fits. I mean, it fits chronologically.The submarine went down in May of 1945 off of Palawan--four months before the wedding. Knowing my grandmother, wedding preparations would have been well advanced by that point--they definitely would have settled on a china pattern."

"And you think you have a photo of your grandpa in Manila around that time?"

"It's definitely Manila. And Manila wasn't liberated until March of '45."

"So what do we have, then? Your grandpa must've had some kind of connection with someone on that U-boat, between March and May."

"A pair of eyeglasses was found on the U-boat." Randy pulls a photo out of his shirt pocket and hands it across to Amy. "I'd be interested to know if they match the specs on that guy. The tall blond."

"I can check it out when I go back. Is the geek on the left your grandpa?"

"Yeah."

"Who's the geek in the middle?"

"I think it's Turing."

"Turing, as in TURING Magazine?"

"They named the magazine after him because he did a lot of early work with computers," Randy says.

"Like your grandpa did."

"Yeah."

"How about this guy we're going to see in Seattle? He's a computer guy too? Ooh, you're getting this look on your face like 'Amy just said something so stupid it caused me physical pain.' Is this a common facial expression among the men of your family? Do you think it is the expression that your grandfather wore when your grandmother came home and announced that she had backed the Lincoln Continental into a fire hydrant?"