That day, after Huang Yiyi had left, I stayed in the forest alone and walked round and round one of the trees like the madman, Jiang Nan. I looked up at the treetops, and at the sky above the treetops, and thought about the holes that the carpenter was cutting in that piece of wood, and I seemed to see light streaming from each hexagonal hole, followed by every secret encrypted in RECOVERY. At that moment I understood why Jiang Nan spent every day walking round the trees talking to himself, and yet was clearly so happy; it was because he had experienced the strange pleasure of having cracked PORPHORY. That day, I really identified with the strange pleasures of a madman.

17

About a week later, Huang Yiyi’s cryptographic bombe was delivered from the carpenters’ workshop, and I called all the members of our special working group into the conference room in order to listen to her explanation.

The cryptographic bombe wasn’t actually particularly complicated. Both in shape and in the way it worked it was somewhat like those machines you see on street corners for measuring your height, where the scale rod moves independently. The difference was that the scale rod on the bombe was a wooden honeycombed board, about thirty centimetres high and as thick as a piece of card. At the bottom there was a square tray, and on all four sides there were troughs, in which you could place the radio intercepts.