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?"