“What’s that?”
“Never mind. What I’m saying is, I don’t need a lot of young cockerels chesting about, competing with each other. Women”—Dilly leveled a finger at Beth—“are more flexible, less competitive, and more inclined to get on with the job in hand. They pay more attention to detail, probably because they’ve been squinting at their knitting and measuring things in kitchens all their lives. They listen. That’s why I like fillies instead of colts, m’dear, not because I’m building a harem. Now, drink your gin.” Beth drank it. Mrs. Knox brought their breakfast, retreating with another tranquil smile, and a wave of hunger nearly flattened Beth. “I don’t know if I can do it again,” she found herself admitting even as she balanced the plate on her lap. No food had ever tasted so good. “Yes, you can. Practice makes perfect. I’ve turned more schoolgirls into first-rate rodders than I can count.” “I didn’t exactly get much training when I started.” Dilly chewed a forkful of his own omelet. “That’s because I want you coming to it fresh and inventive, not with every instinct and impulse trained out of you. Imagination, that’s the name of the game.” “It’s not a game.” Beth had never contradicted a superior in her life, but in this cozy library overlooking a tangled garden, none of the ordinary rules seemed to apply. “It’s war.” “It’s still a game. The most important one. You haven’t seen an Enigma machine yet, have you? Monstrous little things. The air force and naval machines have five possible wheels, which means sixty possible orders depending on which three are picked for the day. Every wheel has twenty-six possible starting positions, and the plugboard behind it has twenty-six jacks. That makes one hundred and fifty million million million starting positions . . . and then the Jerries change the settings every twenty-four hours, so every midnight we have to start over. That’s what we’re up against. The Italian Enigma machine isn’t quite such a beast—no plugboard—but it’s quite bad enough.” Dilly toasted her with a tilted smile. “It’s odds to make you weep, which is why we must think of it as a game. To do otherwise is sheer madness.” Beth was trying to figure out how many zeroes there were in one hundred and fifty million million million, and couldn’t do it. They kept spiraling behind her eyelids in five-block chunks, 00000 00000 00000, down into the rose’s heart. “If the odds are that bad, we won’t ever do it.” “But we are. The Polish cryptanalysts were reading German Enigma traffic since the early thirties, and breaking back in after every change until ’38—we’d be nowhere without them, and now we’ve picked up the torch.” Another silent toast for the Poles. “Bit by terrible bit, we’re doing it.” “Do the Germans really have no idea?” “None. Our fellows are very careful at the top level, how they use the decrypted information we give them. I understand there are rooms of intelligence chaps here who do nothing but mock up plausible ways our information could have been found by some other source than breaking Enigma.” Dilly waved a hand. “Not our business, that part. But they must be doing it right, because the Jerries don’t seem to have realized we’re reading their post. German arrogance—they’ve got their perfect machine, their unbreakable system, so how could anyone possibly be getting around it? Especially a lot of scrubby English lads and lasses in the middle of the countryside, going at it with nothing more than pencil stubs and a little lateral thinking?” “What’s lateral thinking?” “Thinking about things from different angles. Sideways, upside down, inside out.” Dilly set his empty plate aside. “If I was to ask what direction a clock’s hands go, what would you say?” “Um.” Beth twisted her napkin. “Clockwise?” “Not if you’re inside the clock.” Pause. “See?” He smiled. “. . . Yes,” said Beth Finch. THERE WERE NO smiles the following day when she reported for her next shift. Dilly looked preoccupied, shoving Beth some new crib charts. “No Italian Enigma today. The Hut 6 lads need help getting through this lot; it’s piling up and it’s critical. German Enigma, mostly the Red traffic . . .” Beth automatically coiled her plait up on the back of her head, jamming another pencil through to keep it off her neck, waiting for the nerves to swamp her as they had every day for weeks. The terrible fear that she’d fail, that she was stupid and useless and wasting everyone’s time. The fear came, the worry, the nerves—but much diminished. What Beth primarily felt was hunger: Please, God, let me do it again.