With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse-mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy-is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names li ...