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ventilator duct.
    No special fanfare, no brass bands, no ceremony for the departure of a raider , he thought. We are as a reed shaken
with the wind. And what go we out into the wilderness to see? No John the Baptist awaits us. But it’s a kind of baptism all the same.
    Somewhere in the darkness a klaxon hooted. Turn and identify the man next to you. Another Security scheme: Show your identification when the horn sounds. Damn Security! Out here I identify myself to my God and none other.
    Sparrow looked astern at the set of the tow. Oil. War demanded the pure substance born in the sediment of rising continent. Vegetable oil wouldn’t do. War was no vegetarian. War was a carnivore .
    The tow tug shifted to the side of the Ram and now the sub was being nosed into the traveler rack which would carry it down to the underwater canyon and the gulf.
    Sparrow looked at the control console in the conning tower, and the green clear-away light. He flashed the standby signal to the tug below him and, with a practiced motion, touched the controls to retract the tower. It slid smoothly into the sub, its plasteel lid twisting into the groove seats.
    A chest microphone hung beside the tower console. Sparrow slipped it on, spoke into it: “Rig for dive.”
    He focused his attention on the dive board in front of him.
    Back came Bonnett’s voice, robbed of life by the metallic mutes of the intercom: “Pressure in the hull.”
    One by one, the lights on Sparrow’s dive board shifted from red to green. “Green board,” he said. “Stand by.” Now he could feel the hull pressure and another pressure in his stomach. He closed the signal circuit which told the outside crews that the subtug was ready to go down tunnel.
    The Ram shifted, lurched. A dull clang resonated through
the boat. Across the top of the dive board amber lights flashed: they were in the grip of the tunnel elevator. Twenty hours of free ride.
    Sparrow grasped a handhold beside the dive board, swung down and out onto the engine-room catwalk. His feet made a slithering sound on the catwalk padding as he made his way aft, crawled through the control-room door, dogged it behind him. His gaze paused for a moment on the hand-etched brass plate Heppner had attached beside the door—a quotation from some nineteenth-century pundit:
    â€œNo one but a crazy man would waste his time inventing a submarine and no one but a lunatic would go down in it if it were invented.”

    Through the gulf shelf in the Florida elbow, De Soto Canyon slashes the soft peninsula limestone like a railroad cut: fourteen fathoms where it starts in Apalachee Bay, more than two hundred and sixty fathoms where it dives off into the ocean deeps south of Cape San Bias and east of Tampa.
    The gulf exit of the marine tunnel opens into the canyon wall at fifty fathoms: a twilight world of waving fan kelp, red fingers of gorgonian coral, flashing sparkles of reefdwelling fish.
    The Fenian Ram coasted out of the dark hole of the tunnel like a sea monster emerging from its lair, turned, scattering the fish, and slanted down to a resting place in the burnt-umber mud of the canyon bottom. A sonar pulse swept through the boat. Detectors in the triple hulls
responded, registered on control gauges of the navigation deck.
    Garcia’s clipped accent—oddly squeaking in the oxygen-high atmosphere—repeated the check list as he watched the Christmas tree lights of the main board. “ … no leaks, trim weights balanced, external salvage air clear and pressure holding, atmosphere free of nitrogen, TV eyes clear and seeing, TV periscope surfaced and seeing; periscope gyro checks with—” His laughter echoed through the intercom: “Seagull! It tried to land on the peri-box as I started to reel in. Lit on its fanny in the water.”
    Bonnett’s crisp tones interrupted: “What’s it like topside, Joe?”
    â€œClear. Just daybreak. Going to be