Fear like the throbbing strokes of engine pistons, each like a heartbeat, parceling out every hour into breathless minutes of watching, waiting and dreading... For the year is 1942, and this particular ship has lost its convoy.
It travels alone like an aged blind thing groping through the unfriendly dark, stalked by unseen periscopes of steel killers.
At exactly 1:15, a searchlight illuminates the ship, and a surfaced U-boat, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Carl Lanser, opens fire with its deck cannon and machine guns.
His second-in-command, Lt. Mueller, is deeply troubled by what the crew of the boat has done, not warning the people on board the ship before firing upon them, and wonders "if we are not damned now".
Despite Lanser's skepticism and sarcasm, Mueller grows more convinced that the crew of the U-boat may one day answer for their crime by reliving the act for all eternity.
Granted his own private hell as the man who ordered the massacre, the former U-boat commander re-materializes on the deck of the ship and the nightmare begins again.
The short story reveals how Lanser died, showing that his U-boat was sunk by a British destroyer after a crewman on the Queen of Glasgow radioed for assistance.
It also adds a final scene, set 20 years after the episode, in which Barbara Stanley (revealed to have survived the sinking of the Queen of Glasgow by boarding a lifeboat) sees the ghosts of Carl Lanser and Lt. Mueller.