Then nothing happens for a week. Since Randy lacks the information that he needs about zeta functions, he can’t do any actual codebreaking work during this week. But he can lay the groundwork for the work he’ll do later. The Cryptonomicon contains numerous hunks of C code intended to perform certain basic cryptanalytical operations, but a lot of it is folk code (poorly written) and anyway needs to be translated into the more modern C++ language. So Randy does that. The Cryptonomicon also describes various algorithms that will probably come in handy, and Randy implements those in C++ too. It is scut work, but he has nothing else to do, and one of the good things about this particular kind of scut work is that it acquaints you with every little detail of the mathematics; if you don’t understand the math you can’t write the code. As the days go by, his mind turns into some approximation of a cryptanalyst’s. This transformation is indexed by the slow accretion of code in his code-breaking library.