THE LAST GOOD WAR: A Novel by Paul Wonnacott Read Free Book Online

ideas for a machine to speed up the process.
    "The other group—which I'd like you to join—will be headed by Jerzy. Your job will be to find patterns or other ways of reducing the number of iterations we have to wade through to read a message, so we don't have to slog through all 17,000. We've already got a start. As you discovered, messages often start with V; that makes trial and error much easier.
    "In brief," concluded Henryk, "your job will be to rule out some of the 17,000 possibilities—to cut it down to a few thousand. Or even less, if we're lucky.”
    "Rule out things that seem possible but are in fact impossible," mused Anna. "The opposite of genius. Geniuses find out how to do the impossible; they show that things that seem impossible are in fact possible."
    In the coming weeks, Anna wished that she had kept that little comment to herself. It leaked out, and the junior members of their team quickly began to call themselves "Jerzy's Idiots," using a signature logo of what was, apparently, a cross-eyed imbecile. A few—perhaps those who had a crush on their pretty new boss—went so far as to call themselves "Anna's idiots," using a drawing of an imbecile of uncertain gender.
    Of course, the other group were not to be outdone. They began to use a picture of a gorilla dragging its hands on the ground, with "Brute Force" written below.
    Even more than Anna, Henryk wished he hadn't passed her quip along to his secretary. He wondered if the names could cause a security breach; jokes could lead to blabbering at the local bistro. He finally issued a written order:
    Personnel may joke about “idiots” and “gorillas” inside this building, but the two terms and their logos are to be kept strictly inside; they are not to be mentioned outside under any circumstances . And please, no scrawling of idiots or gorillas on bathroom walls. From time to time we have visitors. Some of them, at least, should leave with the illusion that we're doing serious work on weather forecasting.
    Indeed, thought Anna one day, looking out to the quadrangle. There was Jerzy, playfully releasing several balloons, measuring their rise with a stopwatch and sextant. Henryk was delighted to humor him in his hobby as an amateur meteorologist; those outside the building would see the rising balloons and conclude that the Special Meteorology Project was, as advertised, working on weather forecasting. Jerzy also had another talent: he could talk knowledgeably to outsiders about forecasting.
    The job was enough to make the researchers into manic depressives. There were the early inspirations—particularly the decoding of the first inscrutable six, which gave them the basic settings and led to a rapid deciphering of a whole set of Blue intercepts from December. But when they tried January's intercepts, nothing. The old Blue settings didn't work for the new Blue messages; the Germans had apparently changed the settings at the beginning of the year.
    Also, the V clue—which had made the process so much quicker—became useless. The Germans were putting a set of between five and a dozen random letters right after the inscrutable six, to prevent codebreakers from working backward. It was only after three weeks of dreary work that the codebreakers figured that out, and started the decoding effort with the twentieth letter rather than first. But the process was now tedious. When they started in the middle, there was no point in looking for V. In fact, the twentieth letter was likely to be in the middle of a word, which made it much more difficult to figure out when they were actually reading a German passage, not just gibberish.
    Then, disaster struck. At the beginning of April 1937, they found that even the Blue messages were indecipherable. That wasn't such a surprise. The Germans had apparently changed the basic settings again; they could now presumably be counted on to do so every three months or so. But, as the months passed into May, June, July, and