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

weren't clicking cleanly from one letter to another, and sometimes no letter at all would show up when they pressed a key. They thought maybe a tooth on one of the wheels was broken. Saturday morning, they removed the wheels. There was nothing broken, or even severely worn, as far as they could tell. But the pins were dirty, perhaps breaking the electrical connection. They cleaned the wheels and reinstalled them. They get a result now, but it's wrong. That is, it disagrees with the first machine."
    "Then we'd better call in technical services, to go over the machine to see what's wrong.” Henryk was usually calm and businesslike, but now he became forceful. “Just be certain they don't touch the first machine. If it misbehaves, too, we won't know what we're doing.”
     
    T hat week, there were two major developments. The first was Marian's quick calculation. Based on his earlier work, it would take at least two months to reconstruct wheels from intercepted messages, perhaps longer. It would depend on the volume of intercepted traffic.
    The second was more encouraging. After several hours of swearing and tinkering, technical services figured out what had happened to the misbehaving machine. When the staff had put it back together, they had accidentally changed the order of the wheels. When technical services switched them back to the right order, the machine again duplicated the results of the first one.
    "And that," announced Henryk when the group of four met again, "means we face a far more complicated situation. The wheels can be installed in any order—six different ways. Instead of 17,000 possible encodings, we may have to slog through six times as many—over 100,000.
    “But the misbehaving machine may have been simple, blind luck—one of those well disguised blessings. It's possible that our problem of the past five months began when the Germans reordered the wheels. And we have a place to start. We can go back over the intercepts to see if, with brute force, we can decipher a message by putting the wheels in different order. That means we'll need bigger and stronger gorillas; they'll have to go through all possible orderings of the wheels until they find the one the Germans used.”
    It worked. Unfortunately, it wasn't until the sixth and last try that they got the right ordering of wheels for April. After all that work, they felt they were back on track.
    But Henryk was furious. “How could we have been such idiots—such cretin idiots—not to think of something so simple as a reordering of the wheels?”
    Their success was not to last. In January of 1938, they faced an indecipherable mess, no matter how the wheels were ordered. They struggled for several months. Then Henryk, in a stage whisper, asked if anyone had a burglar in the family. A few days later, he disappeared.
    While he was gone, Jerzy went over to the gorillas, to help with the machine Rejewski was working on. Anna was left behind as the only idiot, struggling without success to make sense of the pile of indecipherable messages. She found herself leafing through them again and again, hoping for an inspiration.
    But it didn't come. Day after day, she pored over the intercepts, looking for some sort of pattern where none existed. She was becoming demoralized. At the weekly staff meetings, she found herself saying less and less.
    After one of the meetings, Marian invited her to drop by his office. When she did, she noticed, in the uneven lighting of his room, just how worn his face had become in the past several months. But he wanted to talk about her, not himself.
    “I'm concerned. We may be demanding too much of you.”
    “Not at all. But I'll admit, it's tough.” Anna didn't want to let him know how tired she really was.
    “It's not the hard work; it's the frustration,” Marian commiserated. He suspected she wasn't being honest, that she was nearing exhaustion. “The others have been working very hard too, but work on the new machine is