The part about the promotion turns out to be either military humor or further evidence of Commander Schoen’s mental instability. Other than that small bit of drollery, the story of Waterhouse past this point, for the next ten months, is not much more complicated than the story of a bomb that has just been released from the belly of a plunging airplane. The barriers placed in his path (working his way through the Cryptonomicon , breaking the Nipponese Air Force Meteorological Code, breaking the Coral naval attache machine cipher, breaking Unnamed Nipponese Army Water Transport Code 3A, breaking the Greater East Asia Ministry Code) present about as much resistance as successive decks of a worm eaten wooden frigate. Within a couple of months he is actually writing new chapters of the Cryptonomicon . People speak of it as though it were a book, but it’s not. It is basically a compilation of all of the papers and notes that have drifted up in a particular corner of Commander Schoen’s office over the roughly two-year period that he’s been situated at Station Hypo, as this place is called. It is everything that Commander Schoen knows about breaking codes, which amounts to everything that the United States of America knows. At any moment it could have been annihilated if a janitor had stepped into the room for a few minutes and tidied the place up. Understanding this, Commander Schoen’s colleagues in the officers’ ranks of Station Hypo have devised strenuous measures to prevent any type of tidying or hygienic operations, of any description, in the entire wing of the building that contains Commander Schoen’s office. They know enough, in other words, to understand that the Cryptonomicon is terribly important, and they have the wit to take the measures necessary to keep it safe. Some of them actually consult it from time to time, and use its wisdom to break Nipponese messages, or even solve whole cryptosystems. But Waterhouse is the first guy to come along who is good enough to (at first) point out errors in what Schoen has written, and (soon) assemble the contents of the pile into something like an orderly work, and (eventually) add original material onto it.