Cryptonomicon

"Crapthat 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'ssmall 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 man made 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?"