How long had he been on duty? Jones wondered.  He could have checked easily enough by punching the button on his digital watch, but the sonarman didn't want to.  It would be too depressing.  Me and my big mouth—you bet, Skipper, my ass! he swore to himself.  He'd detected the sub at a range of about twenty miles, maybe, had just barely gotten her—and the fuckin' Atlantic Ocean was three thousand miles across, at least sixty footprint diameters.  He'd need more than luck now.

Well, he did get a Hollywood shower out of it.  Ordinarily a shower on a freshwater-poor ship meant a few seconds of wetting down and a minute or so of lathering, followed by a few more seconds of rinsing the suds off.  It got you clean but was not very satisfying.  This was an improvement over the old days, the oldtimers liked to say.  But back then, Jones often responded, the sailors had to pull oars—or run off diesel and batteries, which amounted to the same thing.  A Hollywood shower is something a sailor starts thinking about after a few days at sea.  You leave the water running, a long, continuous stream of wonderfully warm water.  Commander Mancuso was given to awarding this sensuous pastime in return for above-average performance.  It gave people something tangible to work for.  You couldn't spend extra money on a sub, and there was no beer or women.

Old movies—they were making an effort on that score.  The boat's library wasn't bad, when you had time to sort through the jumble.  And the Dallas had a pair of Apple computers and a few dozen game programs for amusement.  Jones was the boat champion at Choplifter and Zork.  The computers were also used for training purposes, of course, for practice exams and programmed learning tests that ate up most of the use time.