Cryptonomicon

Chapter 33 MORPHIUM

Shaftoe still sees the word every time he closes his eyes. It would be a lot better if he were paying attention to the work at hand: packing demolition charges around the gussets that join the safe to the U-boat.

MORPHIUM. It is printed thus on a yellowed paper label. The label is glued to a small glass bottle. The color of the glass is the same deep purple that you see when your eyes have been dazzled by a powerful light.

Harvey, the sailor who has volunteered to help him, keeps shining his flashlight into Shaftoe's eyes. It is unavoidable; Shaftoe is wedged into a surpassingly awkward position beneath the safe, working with the charges, trying to set the primers with slimy fingers drained of warmth and strength. This would not even be possible if the boat hadn't been torpedoed; before, this cabin was half full of sewage and the safe was immersed in it. Now it has been conveniently drained.

Harvey is not wedged into anything; he is being flung around by the paroxysms of the U-boat, which like a beached shark, is trying stupidly but violently to thrash its way loose from the reef. The beam of his flashlight keeps sweeping across Shaftoe's eyes. Shaftoe blinks, and sees a cosmos of purple: tiny purple bottles labeled MORPHIUM.

“God damn it!” he hollers.

“Is everything all right, Sergeant?” Harvey says.

Harvey doesn't get it. Harvey thinks that Shaftoe is cursing at some problem with the explosives.

The explosives are just fucking great. There's no problem with the explosives. The problem is with Bobby Shaftoe's brain.

He was right there. Waterhouse sent him to find a stethoscope, and Shaftoe went chambering through the U-boat until he found a wooden box. He opened it up and saw right away it was full of medic stuff. He pawed through it, looking for what Waterhouse wanted, and there was the bottle, plain as day, right in front of his face. His hand brushed against it, for god's sake. He saw the label as the beam of his flashlight swept across it:

But he didn't grab it. If it had said MORPHINE he would have grabbed it in a second. But it said MORPHIUM. And it wasn't until about thirty seconds later that he realized that this was a fucking German boat and of course the words would all be different and there was about a 99 percent chance that MORPHIUM was, in fact, exactly the same stuff as MORPHINE. When he realized that he planted his feet in the passageway of the darkened U-boat and let out a deep long scream from way down in his gut. With the noise of the waves, no one heard him. Then he continued onwards and carried out his duty, handing over the stethoscope to Waterhouse. He carried out his duty because he is a Marine.

Blowing this fucking safe off the wall is not his duty. It's just an idea that popped into his head. They've been training him how to use these explosives; why not put it into practice? He's blowing this safe up, not because he is a Marine, but because he is Bobby Shaftoe. And also because it's a great excuse to go back for that morphium.

The U-boat bucks and sends Harvey sprawling to the deck. Shaftoe waits for the motion to subside, then flails for handholds and pulls himself out from under the safe. His weight is mostly on his feet now, but it wouldn't be correct to say he's standing up. In this place, the best you can hope for is to scramble for balance somewhat faster than you are falling on your Keister. Harvey has just lost that race and Shaftoe is winning it for the moment.

“Fire in the hole!” Shaftoe hollers. Harvey finds his feet! Shaftoe gives him a helpful shove out into the passageway. Harvey turns left and heads uphill for the conning tower and the exit. Shaftoe turns right. He heads downhill. Towards the bow. Towards Davy Jones's Locker. Towards the box with the MORPHIUM.

Where the fuck is that box? When he found it before, it was bobbing in the soup. Maybe—horrible thought—maybe it just drained out of the hole made by the torpedo. He passes through a couple of bulkheads. The boat's angle is getting steeper all the time and he ends up walking backwards, like he's descending a ladder, making handholds out of pipes, electrical cables, and the chains that suspend the submarines' bunks. This boat is so damn long.

It seems like a strange way to kill people. Shaftoe's not sure if he approves of everything that is implied by this U-boat. Shaftoe has killed Chinese bandits on the banks of the Yangtze by stabbing them in the chest with a bayonet. He thinks he killed one, once, just by hitting him pretty hard in the head. On Guadalcanal he killed Nips by shooting at them with several different kinds of arms, by rolling rocks down on them, by constructing large bonfires at the entrances to caves where they were holed up, by sneaking up on them in the jungle and cutting their throats, by firing mortars into their positions, even by picking one up and throwing him off a cliff into the pounding surf. Of course he has known for a long time that this face-to-face style of killing the bad guys is kind of old-fashioned, but it's not like he's spent a lot of time thinking about it. The demonstration of the Vickers machine gun that he witnessed in Italy did sort of get him thinking, and now here he is, inside one of the most famous killing machines in the whole war, and what does he see? He sees valves. Or rather the cast-iron wheels that are used for opening and closing valves. Entire bulkheads are covered with iron wheels, ranging from a couple of inches to over a foot in diameter, packed in as densely as barnacles on a rock, in what looks like a completely random and irregular fashion. They are painted either red or black, and they are polished to a gleam from the friction of men's hands.

And where it's not valves it's switches, huge Frankenstein-movie ones. There is one big rotary switch, half green and half red, that's a good two feet in diameter. And it's not like this boat has a lot of windows in it. It's got no windows at all. Just a periscope that can only be used by one guy at a time. And so for these guys, the war comes down to being sealed up in an airtight drum full of shit and turning valve-wheels and throwing switches on command, and from time to time maybe some officer comes back and tells them that they just killed a bunch of guys.

There's that box—it ended up on a bunk. Shaftoe yanks it closer and hauls it open. The contents are all jumbled up, and there's more than one purple bottle in there, and he panics for a moment, thinking he'll have to read all of the labels in their creepy Germanic script, but in a few seconds he finds the MORPHIUM, grabs it, pockets it.

He's on his way back up towards the conning tower when a big roller slams into the outside of the boat and knocks him off balance. He tumbles downhill for a long, long ways, doing backward somersaults straight down the middle of the boat, before he gets himself under control. Everything has gone black; he's lost his flashlight.

He comes very close to panicking now. It's not that he's a panicky guy, just that it's been a while since he had morphine, and when he gets this way, his body reacts badly to things. He's half-blinded by a powerful flash of blue light that is gone before his eyes have time to blink. There's a sizzling noise down below. He moves his left hand and feels a tug on his wrist: the flashlight's lanyard, which he had the presence of mind to wrap around himself. The light scrapes and clanks against the steel grating on which Shaftoe is now spreadeagled, like a saint on the gridiron. There's another flash of blue light, reticulated by black lines, accompanied by a sizzling noise. Shaftoe smells electricity. He raps the flashlight against the grating a couple of times and it comes on again, flickeringly.

The grid's woven from pencil-thick rods spaced a couple of inches apart. He's facedown on it, looking into a hold that, if this U-boat were level, would be below him. The hold is a disaster, its neatly stacked and crated contents now Osterized into a slumgullion of shattered glass, splintered wood, foodstuffs, high explosives, and strategic minerals, all mingled with seawater so that it sloshes back and forth with the rocking of the dead U-boat. A perfect, quivering globe of silver fills through the grating right near his head and descends through his flashlight beam and explodes against a piece of debris. Then another. He looks uphill and sees a rain of silver globules bouncing and rolling down the deckplates toward him: the mercury columns that they use to measure pressure must have been ruptured. There's another blinding blue flash: an electrical spark with a lot of power behind it. Shaftoe looks down through the grid again and perceives that the hold is filled with huge metal cabinets with giant bolts sticking out of them. Every so often a piece of wet debris will bridge the gap between a couple of those bolts and a spark will light the place up: the cabinets are batteries, they are what enable the U-boat to run underwater.

As Sergeant Robert Shaftoe lies there with his face pressed against that chilly grid, taking a few deep breaths and trying to regain his nerve, a big wave rocks the boat back so hard that he's afraid he's going to fall backwards and plummet all the way to the submerged bow. The swill in the battery hold rolls downhill, gathering power and velocity as it falls, and batters the forward bulkhead of the hold with terrifying power; he can hear rivets giving way under the impact. As this happens, most of the battery hold is exposed to the beam of Bobby Shaftoe's flashlight, all the way down to the bottom. And that is when he sees the splintered crates down there—very small crates, such as might be used to contain very heavy supplies. They have been busted open. Through the gaps in the wreckage, Shaftoe can see yellow bricks, once neatly stacked, now scattered. They look exactly like he would imagine gold bars. The only thing wrong with that theory is that there are way too many of them down there for them to be gold bars. It is like when he turned over rotten logs in Wisconsin and found thousands of identical insect eggs sown on the dark earth, glowing with promise.

For a moment, he's tempted. The amount of money down there is beyond calculation. If he could get his hands on just one of those bars—The explosives must have detonated, because Bobby Shaftoe has just gone deaf. That's his cue to get the fuck out of here. He forgets about the gold—morphine's good enough plunder for one day. He half scrambles and half climbs up the grid, up the passageway, up the skipper's cabin, smoke pouring out of its hatch, its bulkheads now weirdly ballooned by the blast wave.

The safe has broken loose! And the cable that he and Harvey attached to it, though it's damaged, is still intact. Someone must be hauling away on it up abovedecks because it is stubbornly and annoying taut. Right now the safe is caught up on jagged obstructions. Shaftoe has to pry it loose. The safe jerks onward and upward, drawn by the taut cable, until it gets caught in something else. Shaftoe follows the safe out of the cabin, up the passageway, up the conning tower ladder, and finally levers himself up out of the submarine and into the teeth of the storm, to a hearty cheer from the waiting sailors.

No more than five minutes later, the U-boat goes away. Shaftoe imagines it tumbling end-over-end down the side of the reef, headed for an undersea canyon, scattering gold bars and mercury globules into the black water like fairy dust. Shaftoe's back on the corvette and everyone is pounding him on the back and toasting him. He just wants to find a private place to open up that purple bottle.