The Atlantic Is Burning
The machine failed once more, and somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, men were drowning because of it.
Hut 8 fell into a sudden silence.
Raindrops pattered softly against the windows of Bletchley Park’s blackout curtains. There was a smell of wet wool and tobacco smoke in the air, combined with the metallic scent of overheated machinery. From the machine cabinets along the wall came the soft click of a relay cooling down.
Alan Turing studied the tape of useless output that had been fed out from the device.
Nonsense once again.
Commander Denniston took off his glasses slowly and massaged the bridge of his nose.
“How long?” he asked.
“One of the naval officers picked up the telegram from his pocket. “Convoy HX-84 lost contact three hours ago.”
Nobody answered after that since everybody understood what lost contact usually meant.
It was becoming a graveyard without any visible corpses.
Alan Turing leaned closer to the printout without noticing the quiet discussion that had started behind his back. Characters formed rigid patterns on the paper:
XJRMN QLLAT VZG—
Patterns were everywhere, especially where nothing worked anymore.
“Are you sure about the assumptions regarding the rotors?” Turing asked, not turning around.
One of the young cryptanalysts, called Peter, squirmed a little.
“As sure as anybody,” he answered reluctantly.
“It’s not sure,” Turing corrected him harshly.
Peter bit his lower lip.
There was a match flaring in the dimness of the room. Someone had lit yet another cigarette.
The Commander turned to look at Turing with tired eyes.
“The Admiralty is wondering if your machine could prove itself useful at all.”
Turing finally turned to look back at Denniston.
The room fell into wary silence because they knew that talking to him could easily mean talking to difficult machinery.
He wore a crooked tie and an unbuttoned cardigan. Two fingers of his right hand were dirty from ink. Turing might have got several hours of sleep recently, but who knew anymore? Time seemed to stretch or contract depending on circumstances.
“The machine proves itself,” Alan stated. ” Its assumptions do not.”
“Please elaborate?”
“The Germans are human beings,” Alan answered impatiently. “Everybody in this room treats Enigma as some kind of mathematics, but that’s not quite true. Their mathematics works under the hands of tired operators inside frozen submarines under stressful conditions.”
A navy officer frowned.
“Machines don’t care.”
“Well, operators do.” Turing grabbed a pencil and started scribbling furiously on a sheet full of calculations already. “Human beings tend to develop habits, repeat phrases they use and try to simplify everything as much as possible when it comes to routine work.”
“And what proof do you have for that?”
Alan gaped blankly.
“Because they’re people,” he said simply.
For a second, there was a hint of amusement on Hugh Alexander’s lips.
Denniston wasn’t amused.
“We lose a ship every week. London expects results, not theories concerning German psychology.”
Turing went on scribbling furiously.
“Every single encrypted message starts with the intention of the person sending it. Of course, procedures put limitations on them, but they create patterns in themselves.” He stabbed a sheet with the tip of the pencil. “Instead of trying to decode the Enigma machine, which seems to be too complicated for our current technology, we need to figure out what sort of messages the operators send.”
“We’ve heard it all.”
“Yes,” Alan agreed, “but unfortunately that’s still true.”
Silence.
Alan realised that several pairs of eyes were trained on him already. People admired him as well as being irritated. He never quite understood when it all happened.
He turned his attention back to his notes before anybody else started talking.
The room slowly resumed activity, like a ship fixing its damages after the storm.
A typewriter was tapping somewhere near. Telephones were ringing in neighbouring huts. Rain was pattering through the old pipes of Bletchley Park. The whole estate looked temporary and thrown together to deal with something that nobody was fully prepared for.
Alan preferred Bletchley after dark, when the corridors were empty, and there was silence except for the noises that the machinery made.
It was easier to talk to it.
A machine wouldn’t contradict him or demand an explanation.
“Turing?” came a low voice behind him.
“Yes?”
“How much longer before you can promise me results?”
Aland] didn’t turn around and just kept staring at the useless output.
“Giving guarantees is imprecise,” Turing answered calmly.
“That’s right!” Denniston exclaimed.
“And mathematically unacceptable!”
“You know that people drown in the Atlantic daily because of that,” Denniston added impatiently.
Alan looked up sharply.
“I’m well aware of that.”
Something must have shown in his face because Denniston suddenly stopped.
Turing turned to the machine.
With his hand, he felt its warm, vibrating body.
It occupied almost half of the room with its chaotic system of rotating drums, wires, and relay panels. Untidy.Experimental.Ridiculous-looking, several high-ranking officials had declared it so.
Machine versus machine.
It still looked crazy to most people.
But Alan suspected that they lacked imagination.
Or boldness.
He adjusted one of the settings on the rotor manually and listened carefully to the pitch changes.
There!
It was never random.
“Peter,” he said suddenly.
“What?”
“Find all the weather reports from Naval Group West, please.”
Peter hesitated.
“But we have already checked them out, haven’t we?”
“Sooner than we’ll be able to give them away,” Alan answered impatiently.
Peter reluctantly went to the adjacent records room.
“Are you going to gamble our whole operation on meteorological reports?”
“I intend to gamble it on human boredom,” Alan retorted.
Several people exchanged glances in the background.
Alan barely noticed that.
It was hard to concentrate on anything when the gears in your head started working furiously.
Most people thought that Enigma made the Germans invincible because of their mathematics. It had nearly done so. However, mathematics had not won this war yet, as it always seemed to win in the beginning.
People won it.
Laziness.
Boredom.
Familiar phrases used in times of stress.
The Germans relied on the Enigma Machine too heavily. They trusted their mathematics to make them virtually invisible to the Allies.
The mistake had been thinking of it as pure mathematics, though.
The machine was never a pure abstraction, not the way humans operated it.
He spread the papers with weather reports out on the desk and started analysing columns of intercepts.
Speed of the winds.
Coordinates.
Temperature.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Always the same habitual patterns hidden under new cryptography.
Turing’s heartbeat sped up slightly.
“Take a look at this!” he muttered.
Nobody responded.
Alan suddenly remembered that they had been discussing the theory in detail recently.
Nevertheless, he couldn’t explain it anymore.
“Just notice the repeated inconsistencies of format. The way they start every report.”
Hugh moved to examine the documents more closely. Turing was grateful to him because Hugh hardly insisted on unnecessary politeness before joining any intellectual debate.
“I can see that,” Hugh muttered.
“I know you can.”
“But it looks thin.”
“Of course it is thin,” Alan replied impatiently. “All great discoveries are thin at first.”
Hugh smiled.
Denniston shook his head in disagreement.
“And this is supposed to be helpful?”
“Of course!” Alan answered enthusiastically. “The Bombe tries to make permutations blamelessly and gets frustrated with its complexity. By making assumptions on habitual patterns in operators’ messages, we minimise the scope of the search space.” He turned to examine the machine more attentively. “The Bombe doesn’t have to solve every possible situation; it needs to guess probable ones instead.”
“We call it ‘guesswork.’”
“It’s called statistics.”
“And ‘guesswork’ as well in war.”
“Statistical analysis is not guesswork,” Alan corrected him. “Probability has never been.”
Denniston frowned.
“In war?” he said sarcastically, “You are starting to sound as if probability mattered more than certainty.”
“It does,” Alan replied.
It was the wrong answer, and he felt it instantly.
He saw several people looking in his direction now.
But it was true.
War and mathematics couldn’t afford certainty, the thing that most people had.
A phone rang loudly in the adjacent room.
No one reacted instantly.
Finally, one of the clerks rushed to answer.
Rain was falling harder on the blacked-out windows. It was battering them together with the wind that whipped tree branches against the glass panes. Somewhere in the basement, a generator was working irregularly.
The clerk returned with a white face.
“There was another submarine attack,” he said, his voice shaking.
The room froze.
“Which convoy?” Hugh asked.
“SC-7.”
Somebody cursed.
The clerk swallowed.
“Preliminary reports estimate over twenty ships destroyed,” he muttered.
Nobody moved.
Alan turned to study the wooden floorboards.
Twenty ships.
People always tried to grasp numbers in their minds.
Twenty ships looked very abstract.
Statistics.
Capacity.
Number of casualties.
But there were men drowning somewhere in the dark waters of the Atlantic, their bodies covered in ice and burning oil.
And his machine was useless.
Denniston rubbed his face tiredly.
“London will want explanations.”
“They will get mathematics.”
“They’ll prefer victories,” Denniston muttered.
Turing looked at the telegram the clerk was holding.
The war started with paperwork.
Paper with typed words.
Then there were deaths that occurred a thousand miles away from everybody.
He tried to picture himself on the Atlantic in the night.
Black water.
Men screaming under icy waves.
Static.
Silence.
Sounds covering the message.
Like the code.
“Do you think your approach will change anything?” the Commander asked after several seconds of awkward silence.
Alan hesitated.
Not because he doubted his mathematics.
Because he was well aware of the consequences now.
Before the war, mistakes were humiliating experiences.
Flawed theories disappeared unnoticed into the oblivion of academia.
Afterwards, they drowned people.
“I think,” Alan said carefully, “that the Germans are more bored than the Enigma.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“That’s the only honest one available.”
Denniston studied him thoughtfully for a while.
“You understand,” he finally said, “that if you fail once more, we might be forced to stop the project completely?”
Alan suddenly felt something cold moving inside his stomach.
Not terror.
Understanding.
Time.
The real enemy was not Enigma, nor Bletchley Park, nor even the Atlantic Ocean.
Every day failure meant the war could be arranged completely differently.
Another convoy attack tomorrow.
Next week.
An infinite number of deaths brought by delays.
He remembered something that Christopher had told him years ago.
About how the universe consisted of invisible clocks.
Everything is running out simultaneously.
“Dennis, you are asking me for more resources, aren’t you?” Denniston asked after a pause. “More machines. Extra people. More authority.”
Turing was suddenly aware of all eyes focused on him.
Rain was hammering against the ceiling.
And he became conscious of the effort needed to convey complicated thoughts into simple sentences understandable to most people.
It took incredible energy.
They all wanted to hear his confidence performed in front of them.
However, truth hardly ever sounded that confident.
Turing looked at the machine again.
At the useless output.
At the telegram with terrible news.
And back at Denniston.
“If we keep doing things traditionally,” he said quietly, “they will keep sinking their ships in a traditional manner.”
Denniston folded his arms.
Alan moved to his side, and his words started coming in succession.
“The point is not that the Enigma can’t be decoded. It’s that everybody considers this intelligence to function like machinery instead of behaviour. Human beings tend to form patterns in their messages regardless of the cryptography used because they consider themselves too complicated to behave traditionally.”
“Do your machines change this pattern?”
“No,” Turing admitted reluctantly. “But they’ll allow us to move faster than they can cope with.”
Nobody uttered a word after that.
Alan wondered if he looked brilliant enough for them.
Insane enough.
Or both.
Hugh looked at him after a while.
“I think he is right.”
“He may be right?” Denniston asked angrily.
“Just say that mathematics rarely provides us with any kind of emotional reassurance.”
Several people chuckled tiredly.
Even Alan managed to smile for a minute.
Just for a second.
Denniston studied the machine thoughtfully.
“How long will it take?”
Alan joined him in looking at the machine.
It stood silently under the dim light, embodying all possible failures and successes in its ugly structure of impossible ambition. It represented a bright future that nobody quite believed in yet.
Alan found it strange that civilisation increasingly had to rely on the objects that few people could comprehend.
Machines. Codes.
Invisible mechanisms regulating life and death in hidden rooms.
Maybe someday, all humanity would depend exclusively on something similar.
He wondered if he would be glad about that.
“No less than six weeks,” Alan answered.
Denniston laughed bitterly.
“We may not have six weeks,” he said.
“Probably not,” Alan agreed.
There was silence hanging over the room.
Finally, Denniston picked up the telegrams from the desk.
“I’m going to speak with London,” he said resignedly. “God knows why.”
Once he left, the room slowly resumed normal activity.
Shuffling of papers.
Ringing phones.
Someone opened the window a little bit to let the fresh air in, despite the rain.
Hugh approached Alan quietly.
“Are you really sure operator’s habits will be enough?”
Alan turned his attention to the weather reports again.
Not enough.
Always not enough.
But possibly, it would suffice.
And war taught him that sometimes it was the crucial factor.
“I think that machines are more human than people usually realise,” Alan said slowly.
“That looks backwards somehow.”
“Yes,” Alan answered. “All true things usually do.”
Thunder rumbled somewhere in the distance.
Alan went to switch the machine on again.
It started making the characteristic noises immediately.
Fast.
Relentless.
Unrelenting.
Alan listened to the rhythm carefully.
Under all that noise, there was bound to be a pattern.
As always.
