"When we get back, I'll show you the photographs," Barney was insisting proudly. "When they assigned this boy as my diving buddy, they sent his name along, Murderer. If it swims. Murderer will go down after it, they said. And they weren't lying."
But that was not how the name originated. Sitting there in the drifting cigarette smoke, feeling the sweat soak through his longjohns, the Murderer wished the submarine's commander would hurry up and decide on a position, let them out of the boat, get it over with.
Probably by now, even the guys who were in U.D.T. training with him believed he got the name by murdering fish.
They gave the name to him, but it was during an orientation meeting with diagrams and graphs and talk of megatons and current-borne radioactivity and a model of an atomic depth charge on the table. An incredulous revulsion had come over him, this mindlessly mechanical can of death that could poison, could make useless two billion struggling years of life, all wasted, single-celled ancestors, diatoms, copepods, wondrous fish.
During the discussion, he had kept exclaiming: "It's murder! It's murder!" This was how he had acquired his name.
"Hey, Murderer," one of the submariners laughed. "You should cut off a sea serpent steak for the skipper. I bet he'd go for one."
"Speaking of murderers," the Murderer blurted, suddenly detesting the name, raising his clean-cut, angrily intelligent face, flooding his longjohns with angry sweat, "you all are potential murderers—on a big scale. Let's say ten thousand victims apiece. I kill a few fish, so I'm a murderer? But you are all gears and cogs of a mass production murder mechanism called a Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine. An impersonal machine that—"
"Not impersonal," the commander's voice said clearly as he came into the compartment. "This boat is just another tool for survival—like a shield or spear. Men make the decisions for it."
Barney said in an attempt to ease the tension, "You want us to bring you any ice cubes, Commander?"