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trays full of food on rolling ships at sea. Furthermore, while none of them had actually anticipated steak and baked potatoes, neither were they expecting the kind of meal they received, and their momentary gratitude quickly changed to anger and then despair as the plates were set down.
    “Lookit this shit—what the hell is it?” DiGeorgio said, springing back from a heap of gray goo with orange bits of carrots suspended near its surface.
    “Who the hell knows what it is?” said Spudhead Miter, poking at the substance with a spoon.
    “It’s swill,” Crump said sadly.
    The men picked through the chow as best they could. The only thing most of them could eat was the lukewarm canned pear that had been plopped into a section of their divided plates. It was a disappointing glimpse into their prospects for the next several weeks.
    Most of them had never been on an ocean voyage before, and the truth was, they found it a little bit exciting—although they would never have admitted this to one another.
    Kahn, who had not been affected by the seasickness, had just finished a reasonably civilized meal in the officers’ mess. The same Filipino stewards had laid out generous helpings of roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, green peas and tossed salad, served on white china—or at least, white crockery—plates on large round tables with white tablecloths. There was ice cream for dessert and iced tea to drink, or milk if you requested it.
    Captain Thurlo, Bravo Company’s Commander, had taken to his bunk at the first signs of the seasickness, and when Kahn looked in on him earlier, Thurlo was in such a state that he did not make sense. The little that could be gotten out of him was that he wanted Kahn, as Executive Officer, to run things until he got better, so Kahn had called a meeting of platoon leaders and told Sergeant Trunk to have the sergeants there too, at nineteen hundred hours in his cabin, to make sure things were going smoothly.
    In the meantime, he decided to take a look around the ship, and staggered off in the sway like a drunken man, hoping that as time went by he would develop a better pair of sea legs. The bow was dipping and rising into a golden Pacific sunset, magnificently illuminated by a bank of low-hanging gray clouds just above the horizon. It made Kahn wish plaintively that he had joined the Navy.

    The coastline had long since disappeared from sight, and the swells had a grayish hue from the angle of the sun. Kahn was wondering, looking at them, just what he would find if he could explore the bottom of the ocean they were passing over right now. He figured the ship must be somewhere near the edge of the continental shelf, which could account for these big rollers they were experiencing—millions of tons of water traveling thousands of miles to pile up against a six-hundred-foot undersea slope.
    Beyond this, the ocean floor dropped down more than a mile, to the hazy world of the abyssal zone, which he had always called abysmal, although actually it was not abysmal, because it had a bottom of sorts, but then beyond this the ocean sometimes dropped off again, to terrific deeps which, if they were not literally abysmal, were at least the closest thing on earth to it, and were certainly dismal, down seven or eight miles beneath the surface, where no ray of sunshine could ever penetrate—a place so hostile to life that nothing except the most bizarre and primitive organisms could ever exist there.
    Watching the huge swells, Kahn mused over what effects the ship might have down in those deeps as it passed over them, if such effects could be recorded. It was an interesting proposition, but given the depth and density of the water and its meager propensity for carrying sound and shock waves, he concluded that the waves would spread out progressively from their source and be totally absorbed before they ever reached the bottom of the deeps. This phenomenon he jokingly named the “Dismal Deeps Effect,” and