pynchon's misdirection Spoiler AtD pg 799

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

     "Of course not, it's in code, isn't it, said Bevis. 
"Fiendish code, I might add. Right off I noticed it 
uses both Old and New Style alphabets---quite pleased 
with myself until twigging that each letter in this alphabet 
also has it's own numerical value, what was known among 
ancient Jewish students of the Torah as 'gematria.' So, as if 
there wasn't quite enough threat to the old mental balance already, 
the message must now be taken also as a series of digits, wherewith 
readers may discover in the text at hand certain hidden messages by adding 
together the number-values of the letters in a group, substituting other groups 
of the same value, so generatting another, covert message. Furthermore this 
particular gematria doesn't stop at simple addition."
     "Oh, dear. What else?"
     "Raising to powers, calculating logarithms, converting strings of 
characters to terms of a series and finding the limits they 
converge to, and---I say Latewood, if you could see 
the look on your face. . .  ."
     "Feel free, please. As there's little enough 
hysterical giggling out here, why we must 
snatch it wheree'er find it, mustn't we."
     "Not to mention field-coefficients, 
eigen values, metric tensors----"

http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/after_tragedy_the_thomas_pynchon_scratchpad/#When:09:50:00Z

Tristero is a reference to the philosopher's stone, via 
Hermes Trismegistus, and the allegory of that stone, 
capable of turning lead into gold, is the allegory for 
Pynchon of the possibilities of metaphor,  'another 
set of possibilities to replace those that had conditioned 
the land to accept any San Narciso among its most 
tender flesh without a reflex or a cry.   

http://www.newvortex.de/lot49_tristero/text3.htm

The next thing is to strike a few keys and get logged 
into the net, to search at first for the different names. 
With 'Thomas Pynchon' the search engine shows a 
few hundred hits in the World Wide Web. Some of 
them lead to an address of the so-called 'unofficial 
homepage of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon' at Pomona 
College in California. But there seems to be no 
possibility to get access to this page. Other 
WWW-pages whose titles sound very promising are 
also inaccessible, even though trying again and again.
Is there someone blocking these pages to prevent 
people from reading them? (Even though it's hard to 
imagine how to do it.) Or maybe these pages don't 
even exist and have never existed and someone is 
just producing all the links that are pointing to nil or 
to nirvana, as programmers would put it. It's probably 
just the paranoia, infected by Oedipa Maas and
 "purely nervous" (p. 75).