The drive into Arkham was uneventful. The old, haunted mountains were uncommonly welcoming, their craggy faces soft in the late summer haze. Tyne was glad to be getting home, home to his study, home to his dog. He had missed the way in which the heavy mist settled on the quiet streams, the familiar fury of the razor-sharp rains, and the thick odor of wet New England soil. Most of all, he missed his calm routine. He was looking forward to reading the local paper and drinking a cup of coffee. He especially wanted to stare blankly out his study window at a stand of motionless birch trees.

Tyne arrived to the thunderous greeting of his frenzied pet and the silent chastisement of a mountain of mail. He threw his bags into a corner and headed for the drinks cabinet. With a glorious glass of golden Glenmorangie firmly in his grateful grasp, he flopped down in his favorite chair amid his favorite books. He spent a good hour gazing contentedly at his stand of birch trees, scratching his dog's head. And when he had finished his second glass of the Glen, he turned scowling to the mail. He got no further than a fly-fishing catalogue, which covered his face as he slept soundly, dreaming of Royal Coachmen and Brown Duns and thick-bellied trout, until early the next morning.

Tyne had come to Arkham directly from his Ph.D. He had been lucky to find exactly the kind of work he wanted in exactly the sort of place he wanted to live. At first, Tyne kept up the furious pace of a big-city university, but after a few years he settled into the saner rhythms of rural New England. He saved some money, and eventually put a downpayment on a home, an eighteenth-century colonial cottage which came with a partially-deaf golden retriever. The couple who sold the place to him made him promise to care for the dog, since they had no family of their own, and the retirement home wouldn't allow pets. Tyne was easily convinced. In the Spring and Fall, he could be found thigh-deep in the Arkham River, throwing homemade flies at unyielding river seams. It was inaccurately said that he preferred the company of trout to the company of people. But every Friday night, he threw darts with the local bar team, and every Sunday his stooped, sturdy six-foot frame sat among the congregation of St. Mark's Episcopal Church of Arkham.

Tyne spent most of his free time in a study he had built from an old rectangular greenhouse, originally an outbuilding to the cottage. After connecting the greenhouse to the cottage, he built low bookcases which formed a half-wall around the room. The remaining, cottage-side wall he covered in several high cases which he filled with books, momentos, and files. On top of the cases, he had placed busts of notable Roman emperors, an idea he borrowed from the famous English antiquary, Sir Robert Cotton. He could sort his books easily, so that, for example, Constantine A 7 was the seventh book on the first shelf under the bust of Constantine. With its polished pine floor and its glass walls, the room was extremely comfortable. Tyne spent most of his days working contentedly there. The dog, Suliman, lounged happily in the center of the room on an old afghan-covered couch which was now ginger with hair. The dog had long ago learned to ignore the barely-heard haws and hums emanating from the piles of papers and books covering two large work tables, although he seemed to take some interest in the lectures on medieval history Tyne occassionally but passionately delivered to him.

Tyne awoke to a hard drive full of e-mail. He'd forgotten to set "no-mail" on one of his discussion lists. He sat at his Macintosh, sipping coffee, and deleting messages. One after another, the messages addressed some arcane corner of medieval Europe, reminding him of the vast country that was the Middle Ages. As he mused on the complexity and magnitude of distant eras, his eye caught something his brain did not. His attention returned to him, and Tyne fumbled about in the program for a while. Suddenly, he found what he'd been after: a message addressed to him personally. It was from someone he'd met at a conference in Michigan a number of years back, a scholar at the internationally famous Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Heinrich Seifred.

"Dear Professor Doktor Tyne," it read in the inimitable German style, "We have recently purchased a small collection of rare manuscripts from the Wolfgang Grundler estate. Two of the manuscripts have been identified as ninth century, but, as we have not received the manuscripts yet, we are not wholly certain of their contents. These have come to my attention only after you asked us to send you information on our collection of ninth-century manuscripts. I am attaching a catalogue description, incomplete as it is. Please let us know if you recognize the incipits or excipits."

It was signed "HS."

Tyne downloaded the attachments and opened them. They were scanned photographs of manuscript pages, and seemed to be relatively common carticularies. Some were interspersed with red numbers. He zoomed in on what he thought must be a gloss. "German," he whispered to himself as he sat back in his chair. Throughout the carticulary were tiny interlinear and marginal glosses in Old High German. Tyne turned to the next photograph, entitled, "The Church of St. Martin of Dijon." It was a grant of property and chattel to the proiry of St. Martin. What immediately interested Tyne was a phrase about half-way through, "various books," next to a long German gloss. Tyne zoomed in on the gloss to find a list. There were not very many works, but one caught Tyne's eye: Germania, the Germania of P. Cornelius Tacitus.

If this gloss was correct, there was a new piece of evidence in his puzzle. Tyne stared bewildered at the screen. Certainly Seifred must have seen this: he had scanned it. Perhaps not. Perhaps some unknowing graduate student had scanned it. But Tacitus' Germania, of all the books it could have been ... the birth document of the German race ... the pride of the Third Reich ... the subject of negotiations between the Italian fascists and Hitler's culture ministry .... Yet there was only one manuscript. It had once been at Fulda, of that he was certain. But at Dijon? Could this gloss be correct? How? When?

It must have been a mistake.

A new piece of evidence?

He rushed to his file cabinet and pulled his reading notes on the Germania from a yellowed folder. Tacitus, the famous Roman historian, wrote the work in 98 a.d. It was a description of various Germanic tribes, their customs, vices, and virtues. Although he described some horrific practices, such as human sacrifice, he described the Germans generally as an honest, open, warlike, invincible people. They knew no luxury, adultery, dishonesty, or cowardice. And, in a phrase that would wreak havoc on the twentieth century, he described the Germans as a pure race, unmingled with foreign peoples. Tacitus' book had inspired Nazi agriculture minister Rudolf Darré to coin the infamous motto of the party: Blood and Soil. The Germania was a cornerstone of Aryan ideology, its very foundation document.

But it existed in only one copy, one fifteenth-century codex presumably copied from the original. That codex had been held at Iesi in the Italian Alps until the Nazis attempted to take it back to Berlin during the fall of Italy. They came in troop carriers to a villa. But the owner, Count Aurelio Balleani, had hidden the manuscript in a trunk in the kitchen of his palazzo in the center of Iesi, a place the Nazis who later came for it neglected to search. He and his family hid in a basement as the SS stumbled through his palazzo, searching in vain, searching ... .

Might this be one of the documents brought out of Dijon to Rome? How did the Germania of Tacitus get to Dijon? And, more importantly, why had this gloss never been seen before? Who was Wolfgang Grundler, and how did he come into possession of this gloss. This most important book. This very German book. The only piece of evidence which put the Germania in the Middle Ages at all was a quotation from it in a ninth-century story, the Translation of Saint Alexander, by Rudolph of Fulda. Other than that single piece of evidence, there was no reason whatsoever to believe the Germania had been known in the Middle Ages. Perhaps it was a forgery. But this gloss ... could the scholars of Hitler's culture ministy, the Ahnenerbe, each searching after the racial identity of the Aryan race, all miss this vital piece of evidence? And who the hell was Wolfgang Grundler?

This was new and unfamiliar territory for Tyne. If Tacitus were mixed up in the goings-on at the School and at Dijon, then the stakes were a great deal higher than some footnote in an obscure journal. The Germania was the great document of German identity. It underwrote the myth of racial purity that informed Hitler's Final Solution. It was, as the scholar Simon Schama had once said, the birth record of the German race. The pages of the Germania sparked the deadly fire to which the eternal flame at Yad Vashem perpetually testifies.

And now, slowly and carefully, Tyne pulled his notebooks from their resting place, and cautiously went over every piece of evidence he had ever collected.

Yes, There be Angles


The seventh century: a time of transformations and unrest. The great tribes of Europe, once unsettled by invasions from the east, are settled now into their new homes. As they start to associate themselves with the territories on which they live, their historians begin to create ethnic histories which explain their mythical pasts. For the Goths, the historian Jordanes; for the Franks, the bishop Gregory of Tours; and for the Angles, the Venerable Bede. These histories describe the relation of the tribe to the most ancient Roman and Greek gods, and through on to Adam. For in the murky dawn of the world there was born a division of man from man, and tribe from tribe. And in the middle centuries of the first millenium, these divisions are recorded. Bede wrote that after the legions of Rome left the island of Britain at the end of the fourth century, the indigenous Celtic tribes began to attack the Romanized Britons. The hapless Britons, native to the island and long reliant on Roman arms, were too ill-equipped to protect themselves. And so they suffered terribly. The Roman army, engaged as it was on the Continent with the Goths, Huns, Vandals, Visigoths, and various other barbarian tribes seeking the riches of Rome, was not much help. So the Britons decided to hire mercenaries.

They sent for the Saxons and Angles, fierce Continental warriors, who would overwhelm the Picts and Irish, and stem the havoc they wreaked. This they did. But when the German newcomers realized that the Britons were such poor soldiers, and that their land was so rich, they decided to stay. And so, the Saxons turned on their former employers. They sent back home for their kin, and soon, the Germanic migration into England was under way.

The Angles settled in the east and north. The Saxons settled in the south and central midlands. The Jutes, or Goths, took Kent and the Isle of Wight. And the Britons were pushed west into the hills, where they began to be called foreigners, wealh, and their country, the place of foreigners, or Wales.

In the north, the Angles built a thriving civilization. Their monasteries, richly endowed, and relatively free of attack, flourished. The cities attracted tradesmen and traders from all over Europe. And in their midst, the bright star of the Anglian church, was the Venerable Bede. Bede lived in a monastery near the mouth of the river Wear. There, he prayed, worked, and taught. He wrote numerous commentaries on the books of Scripture, hoping to provide his countrymen with the knowledge of the past, so it would not be lost, and so that the church of the Angles might be acceptable in God's eyes. As history had taught Bede, those tribes that did not do the will of God were punished: their sovereignty over the island of Britain was lost. After all, had not the luxuriating Romans lost Britain? Had not the Britons, also subject to luxury, next lost Britain? Did not God punish those who failed to keep his commandments? So it was with the Angles. Unless they met their divine obligations, they too would lose sovereignty over the island.

And so, Bede wrote a history of his people, a people Pope Gregory the Great had once called angels. He told of their ancestry, of their missionaries, and especially of their church. He told what happened to Anglian kings who forsook the Church, how they were cut down, and suffered horribly. He told of kings who failed to heed the advice of Anglian clergy, and were also cut down. He showed that success in earthly endeavors was linked to fidelity to God. Only the faithful succeed, Bede told his readers, and the Angles are faithful.

After Bede's death, sovereignty of the island passed to the Mercians, another tribe loosely related to the Angles, and claiming the same ancestry. After them, sovereignty passed to the Saxons, the most famous of whom is King Alfred. Alfred was not only a warrior, but also a scholar. He caused Bede's history to be translated into English, since so few of his countrymen could speak Latin. But he introduced one very important change. Where Bede had said that the three tribes which came from Germany were the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes; Alfred said it had been the Angles, the Saxons, and the Geats. These Geats were the Goths, the Ur-tribe of all the Germans. From the Goths were supposed to have come the Danes, the Vikings, the Jutes, the Angles, the Saxons, and every Germanic tribe ever to have been birthed into Europe. Geat, the forefather of the Geats, was the son of Japheth, son of Noah. Japheth was one of three brothers who were the beginnings of the races of man. Alfred's translation related the English to the most distant of all Germanic ancestors and thence to Adam. He had borrowed this idea from Charlemagne, and it marked the beginning of the first great German empire.

As much as the Bible, these racial myths fed the imaginations and communities of the Middle Ages. During the Renaissance, one of the first books to be printed in Germany was Tacitus' Germania. In that book was contained the same mythology that had fed cultural unity of Germans for hundreds of years. And it would continue to do so for hundreds of years to come.

When the people of England and Germany looked south from their borders, they saw that the luxurious empires of Rome and Byzantium had fallen to Germans. They saw the rise of Theodoric the Goth, the first German emperor of Rome. They saw the rise of Karloman, or Charles the Great, a Frank and thus a German. They saw the rise of the vikings. They saw the viking Northman become Normans, and take over sovereignty in Britain in 1066. And as the centuries progressed, the wealth and power of Europe moved north until the great industrialization of the nineteenth century. Then, the English Empire covered the globe and the wealth of Germany overflowed her coffers. And in their meteoric rise, they quietly said to one another, yes, here are indeed angels, and they have come to inherit the earth.

And theirs was a story to boil the blood and fire the spirit.

Tyne slumped back in the couch, exhausted. His hand scratched the dog's head as he stared out the windows. "Angels," he thought. "Origins," and then fell into a deep, uncomfortable sleep.

When he awoke, his head was a swirl of manuscripts, dates, and words. He poured himself a drink to dampen down the thick cotton in his head. Tyne knew there was but one way to go about the business of beginning research, and it had little to do with a reverie of swirling images. He opened his web browser and typed in the address for the Patrologia Latina. This collection of Latin works was perhaps one of the most impotant sources Tyne knew. Now on-line, it was searchable. He tabbed in to the page and typed, "angel." Immediately, the answers came back. Hundreds of them. He spent three hours reading through the entries, noting some as he went.

Next, he checked the works of Bede for commentary on Sodom, where angels had met Lot. He noted those passages, as well. Then, he looked for any mention of the School in the annals of medieval history. He brought up the brilliant Monuments of German History, and checked there for the Annals of Fulda, hoping for a mention of manuscripts concerning angels. Nothing. He checked authors whose works were at Fulda. He looked there for angels. And so he browsed through the electronic databases of medieval history, noting little, and slowly coming to no conclusion whatsoever. The sun was down, and he was hungry.

Tyne made himself a sandwich and poured himself another drink. He was tired. But somewhere in the back of his head he felt as if he were nearing an answer. It was nearby. He returned to his computer and brought it out of sleep mode. The screen filled with light. As it awoke, a tangetial thought struck Tyne and fluttered about before his eyes. All the manuscripts he'd checked were in electronic format. The ancient manuscripts had become streams of digital impulses. They had awoken from their ancient sleep to a new technology. Even the notes of an obscure glossator could become lines of computer code. What about angels? Had someone coded them?

Tyne opened a text-search engine on his browser. He typed,"Tacitus and angels." Six results. Tyne scrolled down. The first one was familar to him: an undergraduate essay dedicated to the relation of Tacitus' Germania to the Saxons and Angles (misspelled once "angels"). The second was an ftp site. Tyne clicked on it.

"URL not found. File is missing or server does not permit access."

Damn. Next.

"URL not found. File is missing or server does not permit access."

Same thing. Next.

"URL not found. File is missing or server does not permit access."

Again. Next.

The screen came up as a list of ftp files. Tyne found one marked "Directory," and opened it. It was a list of eight-digit numbers, thirty-three of them. Thirty-three. Tyne clicked on one randomly. He was greeted with a page of numbers streaming from one margin to the other. "Cypher," he thought, "a waste of time." Nevertheless, since it was such a small file, he copied it to his hard disc. But it seemed to Tyne that the downloading took too long. 8K should only have taken a second or two; the hard drive hummed for at least ten. Tyne jumped for his modem and snapped it off. He immediately opened a virus program a friend of his had written. It caught something: "Virus detected."

"Damn," thought Tyne. "How is that possible? I only copied text."

The program prompted him: "Delete? Yes. No." Tyne chose not to delete. He wanted a look at this thing. His head hurt and he needed a diversion. He copied the virus to a floppy disc and wiped his disc clean, deleting all traces of the thing from his computer. Now that the thing was isolated, he could examine it in some safety.

He started by scanning the virus' resources individually for anything out of the ordinary. Nothing. He found the text resource and opened that. Careful to select only the characters themselves, ignoring what appeared to be formatting code, he copied the numbers out of the resource into a new one. From that, he rebuilt a new text file. That, he thought, would be safe.

What appeared on his screen looked exactly like what he'd seen on the web. A numeric stream in hexadecimal about 200 characters long. "Cipher or code," he wondered. He hoped it was cipher. He opened his programming application, CodeWarrior, and tried to compile it. C, C++, Pascal, Java, Perl, nothing. No, this wasn't working. He'd have to download a hacker's tool to decompile the virus.

reverie

In the night, Tyne dreamt of lines of text. They swirled around him like birds. Each one sounded its voice, and the sun was bright in his eyes. He fell deep into the earth, and he came to rest on a blanket of grass. He looked up to see a woman sitting cross-legged before a picnic basket. She peered at him. He spoke, but his words fell to the ground and slithered into the green, green grass. In the night, Tyne turned and shifted through a beam of moonlight which moved slowly across his bed. An owl sat outside the window upon the branch of a birch tree, staring into the deep, black woods.

"Do you see my hand?" the woman asked him.

Tyne nodded cautiously.

"Do you see the fingers, how thick they are?

And Tyne saw the sausage-thick fingers, creased like a dead desert river bed, held out before him. Again he nodded.

"And under the nails, do you see?"

The nails were thick with loam, black with the soil.

"That is the earth of Westphalia, and in the Spring the snow-water seeps deep into it. It is black and damp, and it bursts with life. Westphalian life. Do you see?"

Tyne nodded.

And the woman turned into earth. And the earth turned to parchment. And Tyne melted into a thick pool of black ink and spread himself carefully along the parchment until he was made entirely of beautifully-formed words.  

Tyne was tired as he drank his morning coffee. He felt very old, and his head felt heavy. The sky outside threatened rain. He faced a day of writing courses. Tyne had developed unwelcome opinions about the state of the so-called progressive university, and his writing courses reflected his radical conservatism. For some reason, this appealed to the students, and his classes were invariably packed. While flattering to some extent, a full house meant more essays to correct and more office hours.

The drive in to work was uneventful. He parked his 1974 Chevy Bel Air by the English Department and made his way through the modern glass doors. It was too early for students, and the modular couches and chairs were empty. He passed through the lobby towards the wide metal stairs which led to the main offices. Beyond the reception desk, he found his own door locked, opened it, and settled in for the day.

Tyne spent the next week correcting essays and writing lecture notes. His desk was a flurry of office memos, phone messages, and scraps of paper on which he'd scrawled illegible notes he'd regret losing. Students stumbled in and out, confused, angry, and cynical. Each of them seemed to seek some great white whale they could chase down, some windmill at which to tilt. But Tyne had no such animal for them. He had method and resources, and his own love of history. But mostly he had memos and phone messages. He looked forward to his upcoming New York medievalist conference where he could digest the evidence, ask some questions, and orient himself. But now there was too much going on for him to think.

Friday brought Molly's to him, his local bar. Tyne came through the door like a crusader returning home. And he won his dart game.

Breakfast near Tiffany's

The air in New York was like breathing hot cheese. The sun managed to make it past the buildings and bake the streets until an uncomfortable steam invisibly rose from the asphalt. Tyne's shirt was sopping wet and his legs ached. But he was ecstatic: he was a block away from the Second Avenue Deli and the best corned beef in the world. And suddenly, it came into view.

As he emerged into the deli's Eva Picone room, the smell of pickles filled his tainted nostrils and purified them. A waitress moving at the speed of sound dropped a sandwich on his table and echoed away into the kitchen like sonar bouncing off a submarine. Tyne raised the miraculous thing to his mouth and brought his teeth down past rye and sharp mustard into the glorious meat. His eyes rolled back in his head like a shark chewing the head off of a seal and he felt a shiver go through his body. It was perfect.

After a second sandwich, three pickles, and two cherry cokes, Tyne needed desperately to digest. He decided to take a cab to the Public Library where he could kill a few hours before the conference resumed. There might be an interesting exhibit or a comfortable chair.

The New York Public Library had not changed an iota since his last visit. It still inspired him. He walked in and wandered down through the arches, past porticos and hallways, and found an isolated chair tucked into a dark, unvisited corner. Here he sat and stretched his long legs out before him, pulling from his pocket the crumpled conference schedule.

Tyne had come to New York to listen to a panel at the Conference of Atlantic Medievalists. Three professors were speaking on the impact of electronic databases on the study of medieval history. One, Paul Connerly of Tennessee State, promised to speak on Fulda. He hoped he could pull him aside and ask about the Tacitus.

The light in the library was low and the air cool. Soon, his shirt was dry and the ache of walking had left his legs. He pulled from his pocket a sweat-stained pad on which he had noted the unsuccessful results of his codebreaking. The websites seemed to him dead ends now. Better to concentrate on what you know, he thought. And still, the groups of numbers bothered him. The fact that they were encoded bothered him. But he was especially bothered by the fact that these coded pages had all resulted from a single search for angels and Tacitus.

For, how could the search engine recognize the terms "angels" and "Tacitus" in a page of numbers? Where, amid all these ones and fours and eights and so on, were the words "angels" and "Tacitus"? And who could tell him.

Tyne stared at the pages uncomprehendingly. He put the pad away and leaned his head back in the chair. The dome of the ceiling drew his attention, and he followed the graceful lines to their buttresses, then to their columns. "The column," he thought, "is meant to draw the eye upward. That way, our common experience is alerted to the ascendent, and the eyes of our souls are led upwards to a contemplation of what is above us. All maddness, all chaos, all confusion occurrs within six feet of the surface of the earth. In that space, men barter and connive, war and deceive, love and die. And when they are dead, they are sent six feet below the surface of the earth in an architectural mirror of their lives. Within these twelve feet is all life and death conducted. Yet out of this chaos rises columns meant to draw our gaze to the divine, and thereby to put order into our lives. Only though the ascendant is all life ordered, as it is here, beneath this dim dome.

"Perhaps," thought Tyne, "this is how Brown's enigma begins. Angles and salt, books and cities, chaos and war: all unorder and meaningless except through the contemplation of order. Scattered pieces, partial clues, all given meaning through a single principle of order. For Brown, God is the ordering principle. Doesn't John's gospel say that God is the logos, the ordering principle?

"Or perhaps," thought Tyne, "the proposition runs the other way. Only through the contemplation of order can there be chaos. Allow that order exists, then there must be something other than order: disorder. All disorder is disordered only in relation to order. Without order, there can be no disorder. Without order, there can be no confusion. Or, as Parmenides had argued: things are many, there cannot be a one.

"What," thought Tyne, "is at the heart of Brown's enigma? What aporia, what unanswerable dilemma, is posed by the connection between Sodom, Gomorra, and medieval knights? The answer for Brown is God. But what precisely is the question?

"And why Tacitus? Why does his work show up at Fulda at the center of my inquiry? What relation does the Germania have to Brown's enigma? The Germania is more than a book: it is a mystery, a force unto itself. It fed the imaginations of an entire nation for centuries. It was coal to the fire of their worst characteristics. It was a story of origins. Origins. Is that the connection? Tyne wondered. Stories of origins? The pure and unadulterated version of what a people can be, what they are at their best, what they were before they were corrupted? Certainly Tacitus tells such a story: the pure German race, proud in war and just in peace."

Tyne sat straight in the chair and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. This was not a problem he would solve by beginning with first principles. Brown had posed an enigma, not a puzzle. This was a mystery, not an algorithm. "A mystery is made up of numerous problems," Tyne thought, "and the soultion to a mystery is to realize that there are many solutions to be reached before the mystery is no longer mysterious." It wasn't one answer Tyne sought, but many.  

The conference was crowded. Somehow the medievalists had been booked into rooms adjacent to another convention. Tyne read a billboard advertising a session, "Certificates in NT networks." The small print offered him more information: "Sponsored by the American Justice Programs Committee." It was a stroke of luck. Tyne had stumbled across a criminal justice convention and a session on computer security. He decided to attend after Connerly's talk on Fulda.

Paul Connerly spoke briefly about the databse he'd established. His talk was well received, although the audience was sparse. Two more speakers presented rather dull papers on various computer-related topics, but were warmly encouraged with polite questions and kind applause. After the last question, Tyne made for Connerly to ask him about Fulda.

"Tacitus on a booklist? Never heard of it," Connerly said. "Where did you say you'd found it?" They sat at the hotel bar sipping coffee.

Tyne decided to offer the information to Connerly as a show of good faith. After all, if Tyne wanted information, he would have to give some in return. But not the whole hog. "A manuscript that just showed up on the market."

"And it's authentic?"

"As far as I can tell." Tyne confirmed.

"A booklist. Are you positive?"

"Well," said Tyne, "it's not a booklist per se. It's a gloss. The gloss suggests that a copy of Tacitus' Germania was at Fulda in the ninth century."

"But don't we already know that?" asked Connerly. "Isn't it the Translation of Saint Alexander that quotes Tacitus?"

"Or the other way around," said Tyne.

Connerly stared at Tyne. "A forgery?" Tyne could tell Connerly was skeptical, but there was also a glint of excitement in his eyes, perhaps an attraction to the radical bent of the proposition.

"Perhaps."

"Perhaps?" Connerly leaned forward slightly and rubbed the palm of one hand with the fingers of the other. "But the Saint Alexander and now this gloss: aren't these sufficient proof?" Connerly's tone suggested to Tyne that he wanted to be refuted. He wanted Tyne to tell him something was amiss. Tyne could feel it in the strain of Connerly's voice.

"They might be," answered Tyne. "But I'm working on the hypothesis that Fulda was the site of a number of forgeries in the ninth century. There's enough to suggest that it was quite a market."

"You're talking about Levison and Geary, aren't you?"

"Among others," Tyne responded.

"Look," Connerly said, his tone now cautious, "let's be frank about this. The Germania is virtually untouchable. There are too many people invested in it. Personally, I mean. Have you though through the implications of your assertion?"

"What do you mean by Œimplications'?" Tyne asked.

"Alright," said Connerly, and sat back in his seat. "Let's say you find sufficient proof that the Germania is a forgey. Let's imagine that you find a letter, no, five letters‹why not‹that confess to the forgey. 'I, Harold the Monk, forged the Germania.' or some such thing. O.K. Now what? Now, you publish the findings. ŒTacitus' Germania is a downright forgery,' the papers read," and Connerly traced a banner in the air with his hands. "Now, what might happen?"

"I don't understand," Tyne said.

"What might happen?" Connerly repeated with some force. "You've just told the world that the central myth of one of the most powerful nations on earth, the myth that sent millions to the gas chamber, the myth of German racial origins, was invented out of thin air by an unscrupulous monk." Connerly leaned forward. "The one belief that sustained the most despicable massacre in recorded history is a lie."

Tyne was surprised at Connerly's animation. He seemed almost angry. Tyne asked, "Don't we know that already? Don't we know that German racial purity is a myth?"

"Do we know it as a fact?" Connerly asked.

"What do you mean Œas a fact'?"

"As an established fact. We certainly have strong suspicions. We are suspicious of all claims of racial origin, especially from the Germans. But all we have are suspicions, the validity for which is political, not biological. We have no documents, no genealogies, which we can point at and say, 'There, there is the corruption in your pure ancestry.' In fact, it's getting harder and harder to do so."

"Why?" asked Tyne.

"Because the politicization of race in this country is built on a double standard. As academics, we allow the most outrageous methodologies, and we countenace the most absurd claims in questions about race. As citizens, we maintain racial purity laws--on their head, though--in order to establish who is and who is not a minority. From a cold, scientific point of view, we are practicing apartheid and miseducating on the shallow assumption that being a minority is somehow advantageous. And yet, we teach that the German racial laws were inherintly evil because they were disadvantageous to minorities. So, on one hand, we say race laws are fine, and on the other we say they are inherintly evil. That strikes me as hypocrisy.

"To those of us who believe that categorization by race is inherintly wrong," continued Connerly, "inherintly dehumanizing, the propsal that the Nazis may have been correct in their assumptions about the purity of the German race is a huge obstacle. But to those who believe that categorization by race is the only way to right the wrongs of history‹whatever that means‹the same assumptions about race that the Nazis made need to be used every day in this country. To them, the Nazis, for all the evil they perpetrated, represent a national will in the modern age to keep the races separate. Except no one speaks of race anymore. It's been renamed Œculture.'"

"So what does my investigation have to do with any of this?" Tyne asked.

"Your investigation," Connerly slowly said, "gets at the very heart of all of this. Look, Charlie, you're a bright guy with a promising career. You've got some interesting stuff out there in respectable journals. You've got a nice job, and you're almost tenured. This investigation of yours will not sit well with a lot of people.

"One more thing," Connerly added, "I've been at this Fulda thing for a while. I just want to tell you that there's more to this than meets the eye. Tread carefully. Very carefully."

Tyne saw that Connerly was afraid. Beneath the fatherly rhetoric and the patient tutor's guiding hand was the distinct scent of fear. Connerly had found something, of this Tyne was sure. But the warning did not escape Tyne, and he thanked Connerly for it. The two shook hands and parted ways. Connerly repeated his warning as Tyne walked off, and Tyne looked back briefly to see Connerly a worried man.

The computer conference was nuts. Tyne was the only one in a tie. Buzzing around him were pale men and women, almost all of them dressed in t-shirts, baggy plaid shirts open and untucked, and black jeans. A few were in chinos and oxford-cloth button downs, probably those who hadn't yet made it and still needed to impress. Tyne registered as an academic and pinned his nametag to his coat, removing his tie almost immediately.

The security panel was meeting in a few minutes, and Tyne took the opportunity to browse the program. One speaker, Melva DeSalis of YoYoDyne Industries, immediately caught his attention. Her topic was, "Hiding in Public: Precompiled web pages." Tyne shivered. Another stroke of luck? Melva DeSalis was a tall woman with a Virginia accent. Her paper was impossibly arcane for Tyne, but he managed to eek out some broad ideas. Precompilation encryption was a process whereby one would write a program, or application to sense the identification number of a computer's memory chips, the date, and a number of other variables. It would only run on a specific computer. Once the program was running, you would go to a web page and download a series of numbers. These numbers would be fed to the program. Now came the tricky part.

The program didn't decode the message. Instead, it generated another series of numbers. These numbers would be fed into a second program, a compiler. A compiler translated programming languages (like C, C++, Java, and Basic) into functioning programs. But this compiler was designed to read its own programming language‹a language invented just for the code. Once the compiler generated a functioning program, the user would run the program, and a message would come out the other end. DeSalis spoke a lot about interchangeable header files and three-dimensional text generation, visual representations of codes, hiding algorithms in pictures, and more that Tyne didn't understand. Tyne braced himself, ready to be embarrassed about his lack of knowledge, and approached DeSalis. She was just gathering her things and was about to leave.

"Dr. DeSalis?" Tyne asked.

She looked at him and smiled. "It's Mel," she said.

"Hi. I'm Charlie, Charlie Tyne, from Arkham. I was wondering if I could ask you a question about your talk."

DeSalis put her satchel down on a chair. "Sure," she said. "But first tell me whether you liked it or not."

Tyne laughed. "From what I could understand, it was great! Very impressive."

De Salis cocked her head, "You're not in encryption?"

"No. History."

"Huh?" she asked.

"I'm a history professor. But I'm also an amateur hack. I ran across something I think might be a precompiled web page and I was wondering if I could get your opinion."

"A precompiled web page? Really? That's strange. I didn't think there were any out there yet. Where did you find it?"

Tyne showed her the data and the web addresses. He sat with her as she scribbled on a large legal pad, sorting numbers and making calculations. "Every compiler, no matter what the language, needs some initial information. That information is structured in a certain way. I'm looking at these numbers to see if they are structured in that way."

Tyne nodded, half-understanding. She was being friendly for a computer professional, who often felt above the technoglogically illiterate. Tyne was pleased.

"See," she continued, "here's a repeating sequence of two numbers for five lines, each followed at some point by an eight. That suggests calls to include libraries or header files. Get it?"

"Sort of," Tyne answered.

"Well, anyway, at first glance, this looks like a precompiled web page. But I don't understand how you got it into this stage. Did you download a reader, too?"

Tyne suddenly remembered the download. He'd switched off the modem out of fear of a virus, a virus his computer confirmed. He described this to DeSalis.

"Yes, that could have been a reader. No reason it couldn't be mistaken for a virus, since it deposits parts of itself all over the computer. Lucky you were a little slow turning off your modem!"

"So I got the reader, which generated this precompiled series of numbers?" Tyne asked.

"It looks that way."

"Is there any way I can find out what it says?"

"Not unless you get a copy of the compiler, too," De Salis answered.

"One last question," Tyne hesitated, "Mel. I got this through a search for Œangel.'" Tyne thought he should leave out any mention of Tacitus. "How is that possible if it's precompiled?"

DeSails thought for a second. "By accident, probably. Do you know what ASCII is?"

"Isn't that the numerical equivalent of letters on a keyboard?"

"Exactly." De Sails explained, "Each letter on a keyboard has a numerical value. So, when a modem sends the message Œcab,' it really sends Œ99,97,98'‹the ASCII values. A list of numbers this long probably has a series that corresponds to the ASCII values for Œa-n-g-e-l.'"

"So it was just a coincidence," Tyne concluded.

"I'd say it probably was."

Tyne thanked DeSails for her time and patience. After she left, he sat in the empty session room thinking about what she had said. Somehow, it just didn't ring true. And what surprised Tyne the most is that he should imagine someone he never met lying to him.