They had been trying to acquire this particular target for over two days, and Jones had had only an odd hour of sleep here and there. Well, that’s what they pay me for, he reflected bleakly. This was not unprecedented, he’d done it before, but he’d be happy when the labor ended.
The large-aperture towed array was at the end of a thousand-foot cable. Jones referred to the use of it as trolling for whales. In addition to being their most sensitive sonar rig, it protected the Dallas against intruders shadowing her. Ordinarily a submarine’s sonar will work in any direction except aft — an area called the cone of silence, or the baffles. The BQR-15 changed that. Jones had heard all sorts of things on it, subs and surface ships all the timé, low-flying aircraft on occasion. Once, during an exercise off Florida, it had been the noise of diving pelicans that he could not figure out until the skipper had raised the periscope for a look. Then off Bermuda they had encountered mating humpbacks, and a very impressive noise that was. Jones had a personal copy of the tape of them for use on the beach; some women had found it interesting, in a kinky sort of way. He smiled to himself.
There was a considerable amount of surface noise. The signal processors filtered most of it out, and every few minutes Jones switched them off his channel, getting the sound unimpeded to make sure that they weren’t filtering too much out. Machines were dumb; Jones wondered if SAPS might be letting some of that anomalous signal get lost inside the computer chips. That was a problem with computers, really a problem with programming: you’d tell the machine to do something, and it would go do it to the wrong thing. Jones often amused himself working up programs. He knew a few people from college who drew up game programs for personal computers; one of them was making good money with Sierra On-Line Systems…
Daydreaming again, Jonesy, he chided himself. It wasn’t easy listening to nothing for hours on end. It would have been a good idea, he thought, to let sonarmen read on duty. He had better sense than to suggest it. Mr. Thompson might go along, but the skipper and all the senior officers were ex-reactor types with the usual rule of iron: You shall watch every instrument with absolute concentration all the time. Jones didn’t think this was very smart. It was different with sonarmen. They burned out too easily. To combat this Jones had his music tapes and his games. He could lose himself in any sort of diversion, especially Choplifter. A man had to have something, he reasoned, to lose his mind in, at least once a day. And something on duty in some cases. Even truck drivers, hardly the most intellectual of people, had radios and tape players to keep from becoming mesmerized. But sailors on a nuclear sub costing the best part of a billion…
Jones leaned forward, pressing the headphones tight against his head. He tore a page of doodles from his scratch pad and noted the time on a fresh sheet. Next he made some adjustments on his gain controls, already near the top of the scale, and flipped off the processors again. The cacophony of surface noise nearly took his head off. Jones tolerated this for a minute, working the manual muting controls to filter out the worst of the high-frequency noise. Aha! Jones said to himself. Maybe SAPS is messing me up a little — too soon to tell for sure.
When Jones had first been checked out on this gear in sonar school he’d had a burning desire to show it to his brother, who had a masters in electrical engineering and worked as a consultant in the recording industry. He had eleven patents to his name. The stuff on the Dallas would have knocked his eyes out. The navy’s systems for digitalizing sound were years ahead of any commercial technique. Too bad it was all classified right alongside nuclear stuff…
“Mr. Thompson,” Jones said quietly, not looking around, “can you ask the skipper if maybe we can swing more easterly and drop down a knot or two?”
“Skipper,” Thompson went out into the passageway to relay the request. New course and engine orders were given in fifteen seconds. Mancuso was in sonar ten seconds after that.
The skipper had been sweating this. It had been obvious two days ago that their erstwhile contact had not acted as expected, had not run the route, or had never slowed down. Commander Mancuso had guessed wrong on something — had he also guessed wrong on their visitor’s course? And what did it mean if their friend had not run the route? Jones had figured that one out long before. It made her a boomer. Boomer skippers never go fast.
Jones was sitting as usual, hunched over his table, his left hand up commanding quiet as the towed array came around to a precise east-west azimuth at the end of its cable. His cigarette burned away unnoticed in the ashtray. A reel-to-reel tape recorder was operating continuously in the sonar room, its tapes changed hourly and kept for later analysis on shore. Next to it was another whose recordings were used aboard the Dallas for reexamination of contacts. He reached up and switched it on, then turned to see his captain looking down at him. Jones’ face broke into a thin, tired smile.
“Yeah,” he whispered.
Mancuso pointed to the speaker. Jones shook his head. “Too faint, Cap’n. I just barely got it now. Roughly north, I think, but I need some time on that.” Mancuso looked at the intensity needle Jones was tapping. It was down to zero — almost. Every fifty seconds or so it twitched, just a little. Jones was making furious notes. “The goddamned SAPS filters are blanking part of this out!!!!! We need smoother amplifiers and better manual filter controls!!” he wrote.
Mancuso told himself that this was faintly ridiculous. He was watching Jones as he had watched his wife when she’d had Dominic and he was timing the twitches on a needle as he had timed his wife’s contractions. But there was no thrill to match this. The comparison he used to explain it to his father was the thrill you got on the first day of hunting season, when you hear the leaves rustle and you know it’s not a man making the noise. But it was better than that. He was hunting men, men like himself in a vessel like his own…
“Getting louder, Skipper.” Jones leaned back and lit a cigarette. “He’s heading our way. I make him three-five-zero, maybe more like three-five-three. Still real faint, but that’s our boy. We got him.” Jones decided to risk an impertinence. He’d earned a little tolerance. “We wait or we chase, sir?”
“We wait. No sense spooking him. We let him come in nice and close while we do our famous imitation of a hole in the water, then we tag along behind him to wax his tail for a while. I want another tape of this set up, and I want the BC-10 to run a SAPS scan. Use the instruction to bypass the processing algorithms. I want this contact analyzed, not interpreted. Run it every two minutes. I want his signature recorded, digitalized, folded, spindled, and mutilated. I want to know everything there is about him, his propulsion noises, his plant signature, the works. I want to know exactly who he is.”