The yaw numbers slow down, dropping through a hundred degrees, ninety, eighty. At around seventy degrees, something rotates into view at the edge of the screen. It looks like a rugged, particolored sugarloaf rising from the seafloor. Amy gooses the controls a couple of times and the rotation drops to a crawl. The surgarloaf glides into the center of the screen and then stops. “Locking in the gyros,” Amy says, whacking a button. “All forward.” The sugarloaf slowly begins to get bigger. The ROV is moving towards it, its direction automatically stabilized by its built-in gyroscopes.
“Swing wide around it to starboard,” Doug says. “I want a different angle on this.” He pays some attention to a VCR that’s supposed to be recording this feed.
Amy lets the joystick come back to neutral, then executes a series of moves that causes them to lose the image of the wreck for a minute. All they can see are coral formations passing beneath the ROV’s cameras. Then she yaws it around to the left and there it is again: the same streamlined projectile shape. But from this angle, they can see it’s actually projecting from the seafloor at a forty-five degree angle.
“It looks like the nose of an airplane. A bomber,” Randy says. “Like a B-29.”
Doug shakes his head. “Bombers had to have a circular cross-section because they were pressurized. This thing does not have a circular cross-section. It is more eliptical.”
“But I don’t see all of the railings and guns and, and—”
“Crap that a classic German U-boat would have hanging off of it. This is a more modern streamlined shape,” Doug says. He shouts something in Tagalog at one of his crew, over on Glory IV.
“Looks pretty crusty,” Randy says.
“There will be plenty of crap growing on her,” Doug says, “but she’s still recognizable. There was not a catastrophic implosion.”
A crew member runs onto the pamboat carrying an old picture book from Glory IV’s small but idiosyncratic library: a pictorial history of German U-boats. Doug flips past the first three-quarters of the book and stops at a photograph of a sub whose lines are strikingly familiar.
“God, that looks just like the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine,” Randy says. Amy pulls her head out of the viewer and crowds him out of the way to look.
“Except it’s not yellow,” Doug says. “This was the new generation. Hitler could’ve won the war if he’d made a few dozen of these.” He flips forward a few pages. There are pictures of more U-boats with similar lines, but much larger.
A cross-sectional diagram shows a thin-walled, elliptical outer hull enclosing a thick-walled, perfectly circular inner hull. “The circle is the pressure hull. Always kept at one atmosphere and full of air, for the crew. Outside of it, an outer hull, smooth and streamlined, with room for fuel and hydrogen peroxide tanks—”
“It carried its own oxidizer? Like a rocket?”
“Sure—for running submerged. Any interstices in this outer hull would have been filled with seawater, pressurized to match the external pressure of the ocean, to keep it from collapsing.”
Doug holds the book up beneath the television monitor and rotates it, comparing the lines of a U-boat to the shape on the screen. The latter is rugged and furry with coral and other growths, but the similarity is obvious.
“Why isn’t it lying flat on the bottom, I wonder?” Randy says.
Doug grabs a plastic water bottle, which is still mostly full, and tosses it overboard. It floats upside-down.
“Why isn’t it lying flat, Randy?”
“Because there’s an air bubble trapped in one end,” Randy says sheepishly.
“She suffered damage at the stern. The bow pitched up. There was a partial collapse. Seawater, rushing into the breach at the stern, forced all of the air into the bow. The depth is a hundred and fifty-four meters, Randy. That’s fifteen atmospheres of pressure. What does Boyle’s Law tell you?”
“That the volume of the air must have been reduced by a factor of fifteen.”
“Bingo. Suddenly, fourteen-fifteenths of the boat is full of water, and the other fifteenth is a pocket of compressed air, capable of supporting life briefly. Most of her crew dead, she fell fast and settled hard onto the bottom, breaking her back and leaving the bow section pointing upwards, as you see her. If anyone was still alive in the bubble, they died a long, slow death. May God have mercy on their souls.”
In other circumstances, the religious reference would make Randy uncomfortable, but here it seems like the only appropriate thing to say. Think what you will about religious people, they always have something to say at times like this. What would an atheist come up with? Yes, the organisms inhabiting that submarine must have lost their higher neural functions over a prolonged period of time and eventually turned into pieces of rotten meat. So what?
“Closing in on what passes for the conning tower,” Amy says. According to the book, this U-boat isn’t going to have the traditional high vertical tower rising out of its back: just a low streamlined bulge. Amy has piloted the ROV very close to the U-boat now, and once again she brings it to a stop and yaws it around. The hull pans into the screen, a variegated mountain of coral growths, completely unrecognizable as a manmade object—until something dark enters the screen. It turns into a perfectly circular hole. An eel comes snaking out of it and snaps angrily at the camera for a moment, its teeth and gullet filling the screen. When it swims away, they can see a dome-shaped hatch cover hanging from its hinges next to the hole.
“Someone opened the hatch,” Amy says.
“My god,” says Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe. “My god.” He leans away from the TV as if he can’t handle the image any more. He crawls out from under the canopy and stands up, staring out across the South China Sea. “Someone got out of that U-boat.”
Amy is still fascinated, and one with her joysticks, like a thirteen-year-old boy in a video arcade. Randy rubs the strange empty place on his wrist and stares at the screen, but he is not seeing anything now except that perfect round hole.
After a minute or so, he goes out to join Doug, who is ritualistically lighting up a cigar. “This is a good time to smoke,” he mumbles. “Want one?”
“Sure. Thanks.” Randy pulls out a folding multipurpose tool and cuts the end from the cigar, a pretty impressive-looking Cuban number. “Why do you say it’s a good time to smoke?”
“To fix it in your memory. To mark it.” Doug tears his gaze from the horizon and looks at Randy searchingly, almost beseeching him to understand. “This is one of the most important moments in your life. Nothing will ever be the same. We might get rich. We might get killed. We might just have an adventure, or learn something. But we have been changed. We are standing close to the Heraclitean fire, feeling its heat on our faces.” He produces a flaring safety match from his cupped palms like a magician, and holds it up before Randy’s eyes, and Randy puffs the cigar alive, staring into the flame.
“Well, here’s to it,” Randy says.
“And here’s to whoever got out,” replies Doug.
SANTA MONICA
* * *
THE UNITED STATES MILITARY (WATERHOUSE HAS decided) is first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization. For the last couple of weeks he has been owned by the second group. They put him on a luxury liner too swift to be caught by U-boats—though this is a moot point since, as Waterhouse and a few other people know, Dönitz has declared defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic, and pulled his U-boats off the map until he can build the new generation, which will run on rocket fuel and need never come to the surface. In this way Waterhouse got to New York. From Penn Station he took trains to the Midwest, where he spent a week with his family and reassured them for the ten thousandth time that, because of what he knew, he could never be sent into actual combat.
Then it was trains again to Los Angeles, and now he waits for what sounds like it will be a killing series
of airplane flights halfway round the world to Brisbane. He is one of about a million young men and women in uniform and on leave, wandering around Los Angeles looking for some entertainment.
Now, they say that this city is the entertainment capital and so entertainment shouldn’t be hard to find. Indeed you can hardly walk down a city block without bumping into half a dozen prostitutes and passing an equal number of night spots, movie theaters, and pool halls. Waterhouse samples all of these during his four-day layover, and is distressed to find that he is no longer entertained by any of them. Not even the whores!
Maybe this is why he is walking along the bluff north of the Santa Monica Pier, looking for a way down to the beach, which is completely empty—the only thing in Los Angeles that isn’t generating commissions and residuals for someone. The beach lures but does not pander. The plants up here, standing watch over the Pacific, are like something from another planet. No, they do not even look like real plants from any conceivable planet. They are too geometric and perfect. They are schematic diagrams for plants sketched out by some impossibly modern designer with a strong eye for geometry but who has never been out in a woods and seen a real plant. They don’t even grow out of any recognizable organic matrix, they are embedded in the sterile ochre dust that passes for soil in this part of the country. Waterhouse knows that this is just the beginning, that it will only get weirder from here on out. He heard enough from Bobby Shaftoe to know that the other side of the Pacific is going to be indescribably strange.
The sun is preparing to go down and the pier, down the beach to his left, is alight, a gaudy galaxy; the zoot suits of the carnival barkers stand out from a mile away, like emergency flares. But Waterhouse is in no hurry to reach it. He can see ignorant armies of soldiers, sailors, marines milling around, distinguishable by the hues of their uniforms.
The last time he was in California, before Pearl Harbor, he was no different from all of those guys on the pier—just a little smarter, with a knack for numbers and music. But now he understands the war in a way that they never will. He is still wearing the same uniform, but only as a disguise. He believes now that the war, as those guys understand it, is every bit as fictional as the war movies being turned out across town in Hollywood.
They say that Patton and MacArthur are daring generals; the world watches in anticipation of their next intrepid sortie behind enemy lines. Waterhouse knows that Patton and MacArthur, more than anything else, are intelligent consumers of Ultra/Magic. They use it to figure out where the enemy has concentrated his forces, then loop around them and strike where he is weakest. That’s all.
They say that Montgomery is a steady hand, cagey and insightful. Waterhouse has no use for Monty; Monty’s an idiot; Monty doesn’t read his Ultra; he ignores it, in fact, to the detriment of his men and of the war effort.
They say that Yamamoto was killed by a lucky accident when some roving P-38s just happened across an anonymous flight of Nipponese planes and shot them down. Waterhouse knows that Yamamoto’s death warrant was hammered out by an Electrical Till Corporation line printer in a Hawaiian cryptanalysis factory, and that the admiral was the victim of a straightforward political assassination.
Even his concept of geography has changed. When he was home, he sat down with his grandparents and they looked at the globe, spinning it around until all they saw was blue, tracing his route across the Pacific, from one lonely volcano to the next godforsaken atoll. Waterhouse knows that those little islands, before the war, had only one economic function: information processing. The dots and dashes traveling along the undersea cable are swallowed up by the earth currents after a few thousand miles, like ripples in heavy surf. The European powers colonized those islands at about the same time as the long cables were being laid, and constructed power stations where the dots and dashes coming down the line were picked up, amplified, and sent on to the next chain of islands.
Some of those cables must plunge into the deep not far from this beach. Waterhouse is about to follow the dots and dashes over the western horizon, where the world ends.
He finds a ramp that leads down to the beach and lets gravity draw him towards sea level, gazing to the south and west. The water is pacific and colorless beneath a hazy sky, the horizon line is barely discernable.
The fine dry sand plumps under his feet in fat circular waves that crest around his ankles, so he has to stop and unlace his hard leather shoes. Sand has become trapped in the matrix of his black socks and he pulls them off too and stuffs them in his pockets. He walks towards the water carrying one shoe in each hand. He sees others who have tied their shoes together through belt loops, leaving their hands free. But the asymmetry of this offends him, so he carries his shoes as if preparing to invert himself and wade on his hands with his head dangling into the water.
The low sun shines flatly across the sand, grazing the chaos and creating a knife-sharp terminator at the crest of each dunelet. The curves flirt and osculate with one another in some pattern that is, Waterhouse guesses, deeply fascinating and significant but too challenging for his tired mind to attack. Some areas have been stomped level by seagulls.
The sand at the surf line has been washed flat. A small child’s footprints wander across it, splaying like gardenia blossoms on thin shafts. The sand looks like a geometric plane until a sheet of ocean grazes it. Then small imperfections are betrayed by swirls in the water. Those swirls in turn carve the sand. The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks. Plodding through the surf, Waterhouse strikes deep craters in the wet sand that are read by the ocean. Eventually the ocean erases them, but in the process its state has been changed, the pattern of its swirls has been altered. Waterhouse imagines that the disturbance might somehow propagate across the Pacific and into some super-secret Nipponese surveillance device made of bamboo tubes and chrysanthemum leaves; Nip listeners would know that Waterhouse had walked that way. In turn, the water swirling around Waterhouse’s feet carries information about Nip propeller design and the deployment of their fleets—if only he had the wit to read it. The chaos of the waves, gravid with encrypted data, mocks him.
The land war is over for Waterhouse. Now he is gone, gone to the sea. This is the first time he’s taken a good look at it—the sea, that is—since he reached Los Angeles. It looks big to him. Before, when he was at Pearl, it was just a blank, a nothing. Now it looks like an active participant and a vector of information. Fighting a war out on that thing could turn you into some kind of a maniac, make you deranged. What must it be like to be the General? To live for years among volcanoes and alien trees, to forget about oaks and cornfields and snowstorms and football games? To fight the terrible Nipponese in the jungle, burning them out of caves, driving them off cliffs into the sea? To be an oriental potentate—the supreme authority over millions of square miles, hundreds of millions of people. Your only tether to the real world a slender copper fiber rambling across the ocean floor, a faint bleating of dots and dashes in the night? What kind of man would this make you?
OUTPOST
* * *
WHEN THEIR SERGEANT WAS AEROSOLIZED BY THE Australian with the tommy gun, Goto Dengo and his surviving comrades were left mapless, and mapless in the jungles of New Guinea during a war is bad, bad, bad.
In another country, they might have been able to keep walking downhill until they reached the ocean, and then follow the coastline to their destination. But travel along the coast is even more nearly impossible than travel in the interior, because the coast is a chain of pestilential headhunter-infested marshes.
In the end, they find a Nipponese outpost by simply following the sound of the explosions. They may not have maps, but the American Fifth Air Force does.
The relentless bombing is reassuring, in a way, to Goto Dengo. After their encounter with the Australians, he entertains an idea that he dare not voice: that
by the time they reach their destination, it might already have been overrun by the enemy. That he can even conceive of such a possibility proves beyond all doubt that he is no longer fit to be a soldier of the emperor.
In any case, the drone of the bombers’ engines, the tympanic thuds of the explosions, the flashes on the night horizon give them plenty of helpful hints as to where the Nipponese people are located. One of Goto Dengo’s comrades is a farmboy from Kyushu who seems to be capable of substituting enthusiasm for food, water, sleep, medicine, and any other bodily needs. As they trudge onwards through the jungle, this boy keeps his spirits up by looking forward to the day when they draw close enough to hear the sound of the antiaircraft batteries and see the American planes, torn open by shellfire, spiraling into the sea.
That day never arrives. As they get closer, though, they can find the outpost with their eyes closed, simply by following the reek of dysentery and decaying flesh. Just as the stench draws close enough to be overpowering, the enthusiastic boy makes an odd grunting sound. Goto Dengo turns to see a peculiar, small, oval-shaped entrance wound in the center of the boy’s forehead. The boy falls down and lies on the ground quivering.
“We are Nipponese!” Goto Dengo says.
The tendency of bombs to fall out of the sky and blow up among them whenever the sun is up dictates that bunkers and foxholes be dug. Unfortunately ground coincides with water table. Footprints fill up with water before the foot has even been worried loose from the clutching mud. Bomb craters are neat, circular ponds. Slit trenches are zigzagging canals. There are no wheeled vehicles and no beasts of burden, no livestock, no buildings. Those pieces of charred aluminum must have been parts of airplanes once. There are a few heavy weapons, but their barrels are cracked and warped from explosions, and pocked with small craters. Palm trees are squat stumps crowned with a few jagged splinters radiating away from the site of the most recent explosion. The expanse of red mud is flecked with random clutches of gulls tearing at bits of food; Goto Dengo suspects already what they’re eating, and confirms this when he cuts his bare foot on an excerpt of a human jawbone. The sheer volume of high explosive that has detonated here has suffused every molecule of the air, water, and earth with the chemical smell of TNT residue. This smell reminds Goto Dengo of home; the same stuff is good for pulverizing any rock that is standing between you and a vein of ore.