"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?"