men drift slowly away, calling out to their comrades. Goto Dengo ends up on the fringes of a dissolving archipelago of maybe a hundred swimmers. Many of them clutch life preservers or bits of wood to stay afloat. The seas are considerably higher than their heads and so they can't see very far.
Before sunset, the haze lifts for an hour. Goto Dengo can clearly fix the sun's position, so for the first time all day he knows west from east, north from south. Better, he can see peaks rising above the southern horizon, slathered with blue-white glaciers.
'I will swim to New Guinea,' he shouts, and begins doing it. There is no point in trying to discuss it with the others. The ones who are inclined to follow him, do: maybe a few dozen in all. The timing is right-the sea has become miraculously calm. Goto Dengo settles into a slow, easy sidestroke. Most of the others are moving in an improvised dogpaddle. If they are making any progress at all it is totally imperceptible. As the stars begin to come out, he rolls over into a backstroke and gets a fix on Polaris. As long as he swims away from that, it is physically impossible for him to miss New Guinea.
Darkness falls. Dim light is shed by the stars and by a half-moon. The men call to one another, trying to stay bunched together. Some of them get lost; they can be heard but not seen, and those in the main group can do nothing but listen to their pleadings dwindle.
It must be around midnight when the sharks come. The first victim is a man who had lacerated his forehead on a hatch frame when scrambling out of a sinking ship, and who has been bleeding ever since, drawing a thin pink line across the sea, leading the sharks straight to them. The sharks do not know yet what they are dealing with, and so they kill him slowly, worrying him to death in small bites. When he turns out to be easy prey, they explode into some kind of berserk rage that is all the more fantastic for being hidden beneath the black water. Men's voices are cut off in mid-cry as they are jerked straight down. Sometimes a leg or head will suddenly burst free from the surface. The water splashing into Goto Dengo's mouth begins to taste of iron.
The attack goes on for several hours. It appears that the noise and smell have attracted some rival shark packs, because sometimes there is a lull followed by renewed ferocity. A severed shark tail bumps up against Goto Dengo's face; he hangs onto it. The sharks are eating them; why shouldn't he retaliate? In Tokyo restaurants charge a lot of money for shark sashimi. The skin of the shark tail is tough, but hunks of muscle are hanging out of the torn edge. He buries his face in the meat and feasts on it.
When Goto Dengo was young, his father had owned a fedora with English writing on its ivory silk liner, and a briar pipe, and tobacco that he bought through the mail from America. He would sit on a rock up in the hills and snug his fedora down to keep the chilly air from the bald spot on top of his head and smoke his pipe and just look at the world. 'What are you doing?' Dengo would ask him.
'Observing,' father would say.
'But how long can you observe the same thing?'
'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.
A wave breaks behind them, picks them up, and flings them forward across the coral, half-flaying them. Goto Dengo breaks a finger and counts himself lucky. The next breaker takes what little skin he has left and flings him into a lagoon. Something forces his feet upwards, and because his body is just a limp sack of shit at this point, doubles him over head-first into the water. His face strikes a bed of sharp coral sand. Then his hands are in it too. His limbs have forgotten how to do any thing except swim, and so it takes him a while to plant them in the bottom and lift his head out of the water. Then he begins to crawl on his hands and knees. The odor of rotten vegetation is overpowering now, as if a whole division's food supplies had been left out in the sun for a week.
He finds some sand that is not covered with water, turns around, and sits down on it. The Okinawan is right behind him, also on hands and knees, and the Tokyo boy has actually clambered to his feet and is wading ashore, being knocked this way and that by incoming waves. He is laughing.
The Okinawan boy collapses on the sand next to Goto Dengo, not even trying to sit up.
A wave knocks the Tokyo boy off-balance. Laughing, he collapses sideways into the surf, throwing out one hand to break his fall.
