Cryptonomicon

He should have died on the beach on Guadalcanal, along with his buddies, and he didn't. Everything between then and U-691 was just sort of an extra bonus life. He got a chance to go home and see his family, sort of like Jesus after the Resurrection.

Now Bobby Shaftoe is dead for sure. This is why he walks so slowly down the beach, and takes such a brotherly interest in these items, because Bobby Shaftoe is, too, a corpse washed up on the beach in Sweden.

He is thinking about this when he sees the Heavenly Apparition.

The sky here is like a freshly galvanized bucket that has been inverted over the world to block out inconvenient sunlight; if someone lights up a cigarette half a mile away, it blazes like a nova. By those standards, the Heavenly Apparition looks like a whole galaxy falling out of orbit to graze the surface of the world. You could almost mistake it for an air plane, except that it does not make the requisite chesty, droning thrum. This thing emits a screaming whine--and a long trail of fire. Besides, it goes too fast for an airplane. It comes streaking in from the Gulf of Bothnia and crosses the shoreline a couple of miles north of Otto's cabin, gradually losing altitude and slowing down. But as it slows down, the flames burgeon, and claw their way forward up the thing's black body, which resembles the crumpled, curling wick at the root of a candle flame.

It disappears behind trees. Around here, everything disappears behind trees sooner or later. A ball of fire erupts from those trees, and Bobby Shaftoe says, "One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four, one thousand five, one thousand six, one thousand seven" and then stops, hearing the explosion. Then he turns around and walks into Norrsbruck, going faster now.

Chapter 53 LAVENDER ROSE

Randy wants to go down and look at the U-boat in person. Doug says evenly that Randy is welcome to do so, but he needs to draw up a valid dive plan first, and reminds him that the depth of the wreck is one hundred and fifty-four meters. Randy nods as if he had, of course, expected to draw up a dive plan.

He wants everything to be like driving cars, where you just hop in and go. He knows a couple of guys who fly airplanes, and he can still remember how he felt when he learned that you can't just get in a plane (even a small one) and take off--you have to have a flight plan, and it takes a whole briefcase full of books and tables and specialized calculators, and access to weather forecasts above and beyond the normal consumer-grade weather forecasts, to come up with even a bad, wrongflight plan that will surely kill you. Once Randy had gotten used to this idea, he grudgingly admitted it made sense.

Now Doug Shaftoe's telling him he needs a plan just to strap some tanks on his back and swim a hundred and fifty-four meters (straight down, admittedly) and back. So Randy yanks a couple of diving books off the bungeed shelves of Glory IVand tries to come up with even a vague idea of what Doug's talking about. Randy has never gone scuba diving in his life, but he's seen them doing it on Jacques Cousteau and it seems straightforward enough.

The first three books he consults contain more than enough detail to perfectly reproduce the crestfallenness that Randy experienced when he learned about flightplans. Before he'd opened the books Randy had gotten out his mechanical pencil and his graph paper in preparation for making marks on the page; half an hour later he's still trying to get a handle on the contents of the tables, and he hasn't made any marks at all. He notes that the depths in these tables only go down as far as a hundred and thirty, and at that level they only talk in terms of staying down there five or ten minutes. And yet he knows that Amy, and the Shaftoe's colorful and ever-enlarging cast of polyethnic scuba divers, are spending much longer at this depth, and are in fact beginning to come up to the surface with artifacts from the wreck. There is, for example, an aluminum briefcase wherein Doug hopes to find clues as to who was on this U-boat and why it was on the wrong side of the planet.

Randy begins to fear that the entire wreck is going to be stripped bare before he even makes any marks on his piece of graph paper. The divers show up, one or two each day, on speedboats or outrigger canoes from Palawan. Blond surf boys, taciturn galoots, cigarette-smoking Frenchmen, Nintendo-playing Asians, beer-can-crumpling ex-Navy guys, blue-collar hillbillies. Theyall have diving plans. Why doesn't Randy have a diving plan?