He shut the door behind him, deciding to take a last look at the Second Captain’s sonar displays. The computerfiltered data was empty. He scanned the raw unprocessed data, realizing there was too much to examine and what there was was random. He was reminded of a time in his youth when he had been in love with the television set and his parents were gone and a thunderstorm had knocked out the cable system, but he had not accepted that, and in his desperation to watch television he went through every channel, looking for a show. He flipped through channel after channel, seeing nothing but snow, but sometimes seeing a shadow of a face, a hint of printing, a glance at people walking, but then the snow would prevail, leaving him wondering if he had just imagined it. The raw sonar data was like that, all random noise of every frequency and tone and duration.
Looking for the noise made by a machine in that mess was like looking into a rainy jungle for a camouflaged soldier. He snapped off the console and got back into bed.
Comdr, Soemu Toyoda pulled his uniform off, draped it on his chair and climbed into the bed wearing only his shorts. Back in the control room the first officer had orders to continue to patrol the waters offshore until contact was gained on the next enemy sub. Toyoda’s Eternal Spirit had already put three enemy vessels on the bottom, each of them easily detected on sonar, but since then the sea had been empty. Completely empty. Toyoda wondered why, if there were no more enemy ships, there had been no word on the radio command and control circuits about what was going on. It seemed odd, but then so had this entire mission. He turned off his reading lamp, feeling tense and nervous. There was something not right about the situation but he couldn’t put his mind on what it was.
He shut his eyes and tried to think about the woman he had met just prior to sailing. Her name was Suni Ariga and she was half his age and beautiful, vital in a way he wasn’t, mysterious and sexual. She had made it very clear from the start that she wanted him sexually, and it was strange — her generation was so different from his own, so willing to say what they wanted. The young women were entering the work force and threatened to knock on the door of the military someday. But it was the women’s sexuality that was so difficult to accept, centuries of courting rituals being washed down the sewer pipe with other Japanese customs as the television set homogenized the world, the Western influence spreading more by the hour. He returned his thoughts to Suni, seeing her face, remembering how her eyes had looked into his, how her mouth had moved on his chest. He could feel himself getting hard and tried to ignore the feeling, one welcome in the company of an aroused woman but very unwelcome alone inside a ship filled only with men at war.
Bruce Phillips came into control, his cotton poncho flying in the breeze of his passage, his boots clumping on the deckplates, coming to a halt in front of Meritson.
“Man silent battlestations!”
Meritson snapped his fingers at the chief of the watch, having anticipated Phillips’ next action.
There was no circuit-one announcement. The word went out on the phone circuits to the watchstanders in the spaces, each of them wearing cordless phones that put them in touch with the control room. The forward compartment phone talkers woke up the section’s duty messengers, who went through the berthing compartments and woke up the crew. Men jumped out of their coffinlike racks, curtains sliding aside. They climbed into their coveralls, grabbed glasses, shoes, all in the tight dimly lit spaces that were a challenge just to walk through much less dress in. In twenty frantic seconds seventy men rocketed out of the berthing rooms, coverall uniforms wrinkled and stale with sweat, hair spiked from sleep, eyes puffy, all business.
Those seventy men dispersed, some heading aft, others forward or below. In the control room two dozen watchstanders came silently in. Phone talkers strapped on headsets. Plotting officers took their stations at the plot tables snapping fresh sheets of tracing paper over the flat panel displays. The row of consoles of the BSY-2 attack center filled with officers, each trained to manipulate his panel in a unique way, each dancing with the computer to a different song but on the same dance floor. The arriving helmsman waved out the watch section’s helmsman, the new arrival the ship’s best, the regular watch helmsman getting up and muttering what the ship’s course and depth were, the battlestations helmsman sliding into the control seat, the yoke of the controller slipping into his hands.
