What he’s reading here is a set of academic papers, dating to the 1930s and early forties, that have been heavily marked up by his grandfather, who went through them none-too-subtly gleaning anything that could be useful on the cryptographic front. That it’s none too subtle is a good thing for Randy, whose grasp of pure number theory is just barely adequate here. Chester’s minions had to scan not only the fronts of these pages but the backs too, which were originally blank but on which Grandpa wrote many notes. For example there is a paper written by Alan Turing in 1937 in which Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse has found some kind of error, or at least, something that Turing didn’t go into in sufficient detail, forcing him to cover several pages with annotations. Randy’s blood absolutely runs cold at the very idea that he is being so presumptuous as to participate in such a colloquy. When he realizes just how deep over his head he is intellectually, he turns off his computer and goes to bed and sleeps the bootless sleep of the depressed for ten hours. Eventually he convinces himself that most of the junk in these papers probably has no direct relevance to Arethusa and that he just needs to calm down and filter the material carefully.