SNOW CRASH

For a couple of days, a powerful chill wind coming down out off the mountains drives them out of Oregon, out toward the open water. Eliot explains, cheerfully, that this lifeboat was in. vented back in the old days, when they had navies and coast guards that would come and rescue stranded travelers. All you had to do was float and be orange. Fisheye has a walkie-tallde, but it is a short-range device. And Him’s computer is capable of jacking into the net, but in this regard it functions much like a cellular telephone. It doesn’t work out in the middle of nowhere.

When the weather is extremely rainy, they sit under the canopy. When it’s less rainy, they sit above it. They all have ways of passing the time.

Him clicks around with his computer, naturally. Being stranded on a life raft in the Pacific is a perfect venue for a hacker.

Vie reads and rereads a soaked paperback novel that he had in the pocket of his MAFIA windbreaker when the Kowloon got blown out from under them. These days of waiting are much easier for him. As a professional sniper, he knows how to kill time.

Eliot looks at things with his binoculars, even though there is very little to look at. He spends a lot of time messing around with the raft, fretting about it in the way that boat captains do. And he does a lot of fishing. They have plenty of stored food on the raft, but the occasional fresh halibut and salmon are nice to eat.

Fisheye has taken what appears to be an instruction manual from the heavy black suitcase. It is a miniature three-ring binder with pages of laser-printed text. The binder is just a cheap unmarked one bought from a stationery store. In these respects, it is perfectly familiar to Him: it bears the earmarks of a high-tech product that is still under development. All technical devices require documentation of a sort, but this stuff can only be written by the techies who are doing the actual product development, and they absolutely hate it, always put the dox question off to the very last minute. Then they type up some material on a word processor, run it off on the laser printer, send the departmental secretary out for a cheap binder, and that’s that.

But this only occupies Fisheye for a little while. He spends the rest of the time just staring off at the horizon, as though he’s expecting Sicily to heave into view. It doesn’t. He is despondent