Cryptonomicon Read Online Free

countryside of the Garden State. As they rode around New Jersey, they talked about math, and particularly about machines for taking the dull part of math off their hands.
    But Al had been thinking about this subject for longer than Lawrence, and had figured out that computing machines were much more than just labor-saving devices. He’d been working on a radically different sort of computing mechanism that would work out any arithmetic problem whatsoever, as long as you knew how to write the problem down. From a pure logic standpoint, he had already figured out everything there was to know about this (as yet hypothetical) machine, though he had yet to build one. Lawrence gathered that actually building machinery was looked on as undignified at Cambridge (England, that is, where this Al character was based) or for that matter at Fine Hall. Al was thrilled to have found, in Lawrence, someone who did not share this view.
    Al delicately asked him, one day, if Lawrence would terribly mind calling him by his full and proper name, which was Alan and not Al. Lawrence apologized and said he would try very hard to keep it in mind.
    One day a couple of weeks later, as the two of them sat by a running stream in the woods above the Delaware Water Gap, Alan made some kind of an outlandish proposal to Lawrence involving penises. It required a great deal of methodical explanation, which Alan delivered withlots of blushing and stuttering. He was ever so polite, and several times emphasized that he was acutely aware that not everyone in the world was interested in this sort of thing.
    Lawrence decided that he was probably one of those people.
    Alan seemed vastly impressed that Lawrence had paused to think about it at all and apologized for putting him out. They went directly back to a discussion of computing machines, and their friendship continued unchanged. But on their next bicycle ride—an overnight camping trip to the Pine Barrens—they were joined by a new fellow, a German named Rudy von something-or-other.
    Alan and Rudy’s relationship seemed closer, or at least more multilayered, than Alan and Lawrence’s. Lawrence concluded that Alan’s penis scheme must have finally found a taker.
    It got Lawrence to thinking. From an evolution standpoint, what was the point of having people around who were not inclined to have offspring? There must be some good, and fairly subtle, reason for it.
    The only thing he could work out was that it was groups of people—societies—rather than individual creatures, who were now trying to out-reproduce and/or kill each other, and that, in a society, there was plenty of room for someone who didn’t have kids as long as he was up to something useful.
    Alan and Rudy and Lawrence rode south, anyway, looking for the Pine Barrens. After a while the towns became very far apart, and the horse farms gave way to a low stubble of feeble, spiny trees that appeared to extend all the way to Florida—blocking their view, but not the headwind. “Where are the Pine Barrens I wonder?” Lawrence asked a couple of times. He even stopped at a gas station to ask someone that question. His companions began to make fun of him.
    “Vere are ze Pine Barrens?” Rudy inquired, looking about quizzically.
    “I should look for something rather barren-looking, with numerous pine trees,” Alan mused.
    There was no other traffic and so they had spread out across the road to pedal three abreast, with Alan in the middle.
    “A forest, as Kafka would imagine it,” Rudy muttered.
    By this point Lawrence had figured out that they were, in fact, in the Pine Barrens. But he didn’t know who Kafka was. “A mathematician?” he guessed.
    “ Zat is a scary sing to sink of,” Rudy said.
    “He is a writer,” Alan said. “Lawrence, please don’t be offended that I ask you this, but: do you recognize any other people’s names at all? Other than family and close friends, I mean.”
    Lawrence must have looked baffled. “I’m trying