The Dallas' chart table was a new gadget wired into the BC-10 and projected onto a TV-type glass screen four feet square.  The display moved as the Dallas moved.  This made paper charts obsolete, though they were kept anyway.  Charts can't break.

"Thanks, Skipper," Jones said, more humbly than usual.  "I know you're kinda busy, but I think I got something here.  That anomalous contact we had the other day's been bothering me.  I had to leave it after the ruckus the other Russkie subs kicked up, but I was able to come back to it three times to make sure it was still there.  The fourth time it was gone, faded out.  I want to show you what I worked up.  Can you punch up our course track for back then on this baby, sir?"

The chart table was interfaced through the BC-10 into the ship's inertial navigation system, SINS.  Mancuso punched the command in himself.  It was getting so that they couldn't flush the head without a computer command . . . The Dallas' course track showed up as a convoluted red line, with tick marks displayed at fifteen-minute intervals.

"Great!" Jones commented.  "I've never seen it do that before.  That's all right.  Okay."  Jones pulled a handful of pencils from his back pocket.  "Now, I got the contact first at 0915 or so, and the bearing was about two-six-nine."  He set a pencil down, eraser at Dallas' position, point directed west towards the target.  "Then at 0930 it was bearing a two-six-zero.  At 0948, it was two-five-zero.  There's some error built into these, Cap'n.  It was a tough signal to lock in on, but the errors should average out.  Right about then we got all this other activity, and I had to go after them, but I came back to it about 1000, and the bearing was two-four-two."  Jones set down another pencil on the due-east line traced when the Dallas had moved away from the Icelandic coast.  "At 1015 it was two-three-four, and at 1030 it was two-two-seven.  These last two are shaky, sir.  The signal was real faint, and I didn't have a very good lock on it."  Jones looked up.  He appeared nervous.

"So far, so good.  Relax, Jonesy.  Light up if you want."

"Thanks, Cap'n."  Jones fished out a cigarette and lit it with a butane lighter.  He had never approached the captain quite this way.  He knew Mancuso to be a tolerant, easygoing commander—if you had something to say.  He was not a man who liked his time wasted, and it was sure as hell he wouldn't want it wasted now.  "Okay, sir, we gotta figure he couldn't be too far away from us, right?  I mean, he had to be between us and Iceland.  So let's say he was about halfway between.  That gives him a course about like this."  Jones set down some more pencils.

"Hold it, Jonesy.  Where does the course come from?"