Cryptonomicon

"Forever. Look over there." Father pointed with the stem of his pipe. A thread of white smoke piped out of the mouthpiece, like a silk thread being unwound from a cocoon. "That band of dark rock is mineral-bearing. We could get copper out of there, probably some zinc and lead too. We would run a cog railway up the valley to that flat spot there, then sink an angle shaft parallel to the face of the deposit Then Dengo would get into the act and decide where the workers would live, where the school would be built for their children, where the playing field would be. By the time they were finished they would have populated the whole valley with an imaginary city.

Goto Dengo has plenty of time to make observations this night. He observes that severed body parts almost never get attacked. The men who swim most violently are always the first to get it. So, when the sharks come in, he tries to float on his back and not move a muscle, even when the jagged ends of someone's ribs poke him in the face.

Dawn arrives, one or two hundred hours after the previous sunset. He has never stayed awake all night long before, and finds it shocking to see something as big as the sun go down on one side of the planet and come up on the opposite. He is a virus, a germ living on the surface of unfathomably giant bodies in violent motion. And, amazingly enough, he is still not alone: three other men have survived the night of the sharks. They converge on one another and turn to face the ice-covered mountains of New Guinea, salmon-colored in the dawn light.

"They have not gotten any closer," one of the men says.

"They are deep in the interior," Goto Dengo says. "We are not swimming to the mountains--only to the shore--much closer. Let's go before we die of dehydration!" And he plunges forward into a sidestroke.

One of the others, a boy who speaks with an Okinawan accent, is an excellent swimmer. He and Goto Dengo can easily outdistance the others. For most of the day, they try to stay together with the other two anyway. The waves come up and make it difficult even for good swimmers to move.

One of the slower swimmers has been fighting diarrhea since long before his ship was sunk out from under him and was probably dehydrated to begin with. Around midday, when the sun is coming straight down on top of them like a flamethrower, he goes into convulsions, gets some water into his lungs, and disappears.

The other slow swimmer is from Tokyo. He's in much better physical condition--he simply doesn't know how to swim. "There is no better time or place to learn," Goto Dengo says. He and the Okinawan spend an hour or so teaching him the sidestroke and backstroke, and then they resume swimming southwards.

Around sunset, Goto Dengo catches the Okinawan gulping down mouthful after mouthful of seawater. It is painful to watch, mostly because he himself has been wanting to do it. "No! It will make you sick!" he says. His voice is weak. The effort of filling his lungs, expanding his ribcage against the relentless pressure of the water, is ruining him; every muscle in his torso is rigid and tender.

The Okinawan has already started retching by the time Goto Dengo reaches him. With the help of the Tokyo boy, he sticks his fingers down the Okinawan's throat and gets him to vomit it all up.

He is very sick anyway, and until late at night cannot do anything except float on his back and mumble deliriously. But just as Goto Dengo is about to abandon him, he becomes lucid, asking "Where is Polaris?"

"It is cloudy tonight," Goto Dengo says. "But there is a bright spot in the clouds that might be the moon."

Based on the position of that bright spot, they guess the position of New Guinea and resume swimming. Their arms and legs are like sacks of clay, and all of them are hallucinating.

The sun seems to be coming up. They are in a nebula of vapor, radiant with peach-colored light, as if hurtling through a distant part of the galaxy.

"I smell something rotten," says one of them. Goto Dengo cannot tell which.

"Gangrene?" guesses the other.

Goto Dengo fills his nostrils, an act that consumes about half of his remaining energy reserves. "It is not rotten flesh," he says. "It is vegetation."

None of them can swim anymore. If they could, they wouldn't know which direction to choose, because the mist glows uniformly. If they picked a direction, it wouldn't matter, because the current is taking them where it will.

Goto Dengo sleeps for a while, or maybe he doesn't.

Something bumps his leg. Thank god; the sharks have come to finish them.

The waves have grown aggressive. He feels another bump. The burned flesh on his leg screams. It is something very hard, rough, and sharp.

Something is projecting out of the water just ahead, something bumpy and white. A coral head.