'A few – but very likely they were only signals. Coded data speeding through the fog, so opaque to light, but so transparent to sound – ' and here he lost control of his intellectual sphincters and began to think out loud in French, fortified with Latin, working out a system for sending encrypted data from place to place using explosions, building on ideas from Wilkins's Cryptonomicon but marrying them to a practical plan that, in its lavish expenditure of gunpowder, would be sure to please John Comstock. In other words, he identified himself (to Daniel anyway) as Dr. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The watchers lost interest and began aiming their questions at another boat.