The good old stuff, p.57
The Good Old Stuff, page 57
“I bait.”
“We’ll see.”
“That’s all I do. If she wants a Slideman she’s going to have to ask nicely.”
“You think she’ll have to?”
“I think she’ll have to.”
“And if she does, can you do it?”
“A fair question,” I puffed. “I don’t know the answer, though.”
I’d incorporate my soul and trade forty percent of the stock for the answer. I’d give a couple years off my life for the answer. But there doesn’t seem to be a lineup of supernatural takers, because no one knows. Supposing when we get out there, luck being with us, we find ourselves an Ikky?
Supposing we succeed in baiting him and get lines on him. What then?
If we get him shipside, will she hold on or crack up? What if she’s made of sterner stuff than Davits, who used to hunt sharks with poison-darted air pistols? Supposing she lands him and Davits has to stand there like a video extra.
Worse yet, supposing she asks for Davits and he still stands there like a video extra or something else—say, some yellowbellied embodiment named Cringe?
It was when I got him up above the eight-foot horizon of steel and looked out at all that body, sloping on and on till it dropped out of sight like a green mountain range ... And that head. Small for the body, but still immense. Fat, craggy, with lidless roulettes that had spun black and red since before my forefathers decided to try the New Continent. And swaying.
Fresh narco-tanks had been connected. It needed another shot, fast.
But I was paralyzed.
It had made a noise like God playing a Hammond organ ....
And looked at me!
I don’t know if seeing is even the same process in eyes like those. I doubt it. Maybe I was just a gray blur behind a black rock, with the plexi-reflected sky hurting its pupils. But it fixed on me. Perhaps the snake doesn’t really paralyze the rabbit, p perhaps it’s just that rabbits are cowards by constitution. But it began to struggle and I still couldn’t move, fascinated.
Fascinated by all that power, by those eyes, they found me there fifteen minutes later, a little broken about the head and shoulders, the Inject still unpushed.
And I dream about those eyes. I want to face them once more, even if their finding takes forever. I’ve got to know if there’s something inside me that sets me apart from a rabbit, from notched plates of reflexes and instincts that always fall apart in exactly the same way whenever the proper combination is spun.
Looking down, I noticed that my hand was shaking. Glancing up, I noticed that no one else was noticing.
I finished my drink and emptied my pipe. It was late and no songbirds were singing.
I sat whittling, my legs hanging over the aft edge, the chips spinning down into the furrow of our wake. Three days out. No action.
“You!”
“Me ?”
Hair like the end of the rainbow, eyes like nothing in nature, fine teeth. “Hello.”
“There’s a safety rule against what you’re doing, you know.”
“I know. I’ve been worrying about it all morning.”
A delicate curl climbed my knife then drifted out behind us. It settled into the foam and was plowed under. I watched her reflection in my blade, taking a secret pleasure in its distortion.
“Are you baiting me?” she finally asked.
I heard her laugh then, and turned, knowing it had been intentional.
“What, me?”
“I could push you off from here, very easily.”
“I’d make it back.”
“Would you push me off, then—some dark night, perhaps?”
“They’re all dark, Miss Luharich. No, I’d rather make you a gift of my carving.”
She seated herself beside me then, and I couldn’t help but notice the dimples in her knees. She wore white shorts and a halter and still had an offworld tan to her which was awfully appealing. I almost felt a twinge of guilt at having planned the whole scene but my right hand still blocked her view of the wooden animal.
“Okay, I’ll bite. What have you got for me?”
“Just a second. It’s almost finished.”
Solemnly, I passed her the wooden jackass I had been carving. I felt a little sorry and slightly jackass-ish myself, but I had to follow through. I always do. The mouth was split into a braying grin. The ears were upright.
She didn’t smile and she didn’t frown. She just studied it.
“It’s very good,” she finally said, “like most things you do—and appropriate, perhaps.”
“Give it to me.” I extended a palm.
She handed it back and I tossed it out over the water. It missed the white water and bobbed for awhile like a pigmy seahorse.
“Why did you do that?”
“It was a poor joke. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe you are right, though. Perhaps this time I’ve bitten off a little too much.”
I snorted.
“Then why not do something safer, like another race?” She shook her end of the rainbow. “No. It has to be an Ikky.” Why? “Why did you want one so badly that you threw away a fortune?”
“Many reasons,” I said. “An unfrocked analyst who held black therapy sessions in his basement once told me, ‘Mister Davits, you need to reinforce the image of your masculinity by catching one of every kind of fish in existence.” Fish are a very ancient masculinity symbol, you know. So I set out to do it. I have one more to go. Why do you want to reinforce your masculinity?”
“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to reinforce anything but Luharich Enterprises. My chief statistician once said, ‘Miss Luharich, sell all the cold cream and face powder in the System and you’ll be a happy girl. Rich, too.” And he was right. I am the p roof. I can look the way I do and do anything, and I sell most of the lipstick and face powder in the System—but I have to be able to do anything.”
“You do look cool and efficient,” I observed.
“I don’t feel cool,” she said, rising. “Let’s go for a swim.”
“May I point out that we are making pretty good time?”
“If you want to indicate the obvious, you may. You said you could make it back to the ship, unassisted. Change your mind?”
“Then get us two scuba outfits and I’ll race you under Tensquare.”
“I’ll win, too,” she added.
I stood and looked down at her, because that usually makes me feel superior to women.
“Daughter of Lir, eyes of Picasso,” I said, “you’ve got yourself a race.
Meet me at the forward Rook, starboard, in ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes,” she agreed.
And ten minutes it was. From the center blister to the Rook took maybe two of them, with the load I was carrying. My sandals grew very hot and I was glad to shuck them for flippers when I reached the comparative cool of the corner.
We slid into harnesses and adjusted our gear. She had changed into a trim one-piece green job that made me shade my eyes and look away, then look back again.
I fastened a rope ladder and kicked it over the side. Then I pounded on the wall of the Rook.
“Yeah?”
“You talk to the port Rook, aft?” I called.
“They’re all set up,” came the answer. “There’s ladders and drag-lines all over that end.”
“You sure you want to do this?” asked the sunburnt little gink who was her publicity man, Anderson yclept.
He sat beside the Rook in a deckchair, sipping lemonade through a straw.
“It might be dangerous,” he observed, sunken-mouthed. (His teeth were beside him, in another glass.) “That’s right,” she smiled. “It will be dangerous. Not overly, though.”
“Then why don’t you let me get some pictures? We’d have them back to Lifeline in an hour. They’d be in New York by tonight. Good copy.”
“No,” she said, and turned away from both of us. She raised her hands to her eyes. “Here, keep these for me.”
She passed him a box full of her unseeing, and when she turned back to me they were the same brown that I remembered.
“Ready?”
“No,” I said, tautly. “Listen carefully, Jean. If you’re going to play this game there are a few rules. First,” I counted, “we’re going to be directly beneath the hull, so we have to start low and keep moving. If we bump the bottom, we could rupture an air tank .... “ She began to protest that any moron knew that and I cut her down.
“Second,” I went on, “there won’t be much light, so we’ll stay close together, and we will both carry torches.”
Her wet eyes flashed.
“I dragged you out of Govino without—” Then she stopped and turned away. She picked up a lamp.
“Okay. Torches. Sorry.”
“... And watch out for the drive-screws,” I finished. “There’ll be strong currents for at least fifty meters behind them.”
She wiped her eyes again and adjusted the mask. “All right, let’s go.”
We went.
She led the way, at my insistence. The surface layer was pleasantly warm. At two fathoms the water was bracing; at five it was nice and cold. At eight we let go the swinging stairway and struck out.
Tensquare sped forward and we raced in the opposite direction, tattooing the hull yellow at ten-second intervals.
The hull stayed where it belonged, but we raced on like two darkside satellites. Periodically, I tickled her frog feet with my light and traced her antennae of bubbles. About a five meter lead was fine; I’d beat her in the home stretch, but I couldn’t let her drop behind yet.
Beneath us, black. Immense. Deep. The Mindanao of Venus, where eternity might eventually pass the dead to a rest in cities of unnamed fishes. I twisted my head away and touched the hull with a feeler of light; it told me we were about a quarter of the way along.
I increased my beat to match her stepped-up stroke, and narrowed the distance which she had suddenly opened by a couple meters. She sped up again and I did, too. I spotted her with my beam.
She turned and it caught on her mask. I never knew whether she’d been smiling. Probably. She raised two fingers in a V-for-Victory and then cut ahead at full speed.
I should have known. I should have felt it coming. It was just a race to her, something else to win. Damn the torpedoes!
So I leaned into it, hard. I don’t shake in the water. Or, if I do it doesn’t matter and I don’t notice it. I began to close the gap again.
She looked back, sped on, looked back. Each time she looked it was nearer, until I’d narrowed it down to the original five meters.
Then she hit the jatoes.
That’s what I had been fearing. We were about halfway under and she shouldn’t have done it. The powerful jets of compressed air could easily rocket her upward into the hull, or tear something loose if she allowed her body to twist. Their main use is in tearing free from marine plants or fighting bad currents. I had wanted them along as a safety measure, because of the big suck-and-pull windmills behind.
She shot ahead like a meteorite, and I could feel a sudden tingle of perspiration leaping to meet and mix with the churning waters.
I swept ahead, not wanting to use my own guns, and she tripled, quadrupled the margin.
The jets died and she was still on course. Okay, I was an old fuddyduddy. She could have messed up and headed toward the top.
I plowed the sea and began to gather back my yardage, a foot at a time.
I wouldn’t be able to catch her or beat her now, but I’d be on the ropes before she hit deck.
Then the spinning magnets began their insistence and she wavered. It was an awfully powerful drag, even at this distance. The call of the meat grinder.
I’d been scratched up by one once, under the Dolphin, a fishing boat of the middle-class. I had been drinking, but it was also a rough day, and the thing had been turned on prematurely. Fortunately, it was turned off in time, also, and a tendon-stapler in made everything good as new, except in the log, where it only mentioned that I’d been drinking.
Nothing about it being off-hours when I had a right to do as I damn well pleased.
She had slowed to half her speed, but she was still moving crosswise, toward the port, aft corner. I began to feel the pull myself and had to slow down. She’d made it past the main one, but she seemed too far back. It’s hard to gauge distances under water, but each red beat of time told me I was right. She was out of danger from the main one, but the smaller port screw, located about eighty meters in, was no longer a threat but a certainty.
She had turned and was pulling away from it now. Twenty meters separated us. She was standing still. Fifteen.
Slowly, she began a backward drifting. I hit my jatoes, aiming two meters behind her and about twenty back of the blades.
Straightline! Thankgod! Catching, softbelly, lead pipe on shoulder swim-like HELL! maskcracked, not broke though X*eD UP!
We caught a line and I remember brandy.
Into the cradle endlessly rocking I spit, pacing. Insomnia tonight and left shoulder sore again, so let it rain on me—they can cure rheumatism. Stupid as hell. What I said. In blankets and shivering.
She: “Carl, I can’t say it.” Me: “Then call it square for that night in Govino, Miss Luharich. Huh?” She: nothing. Me: “Any more of that brandy?” She: “Give me another, too.” Me: sounds of sipping. It had only lasted three months. No alimony. Many $ on both sides. Not sure whether they were happy or not. Wine-dark Aegean. Good fishing.
Maybe he should have spent more time on shore. Or perhaps she shouldn’t have. Good swimmer, though. Dragged him all the way to Vido to wring out his lungs. Young. Both. Strong. Both. Rich and spoiled as hell. Ditto. Corfu should have brought them closer.
Didn’t. I think that mental cruelty was a trout. He wanted to go to Canada. She: “Go to hell if you want!” He: “Will you go along?” She: “No.” But she did, anyhow. Many hells. Expensive. He lost a monster or two. She inlier ited a couple. Lot of lightning tonight. Stupid as hell. Civility’s the coffin of a conned soul. By whom?—Sounds like a bloody neo-ex But I hate you, Anderson, with your glass full of teeth and her new eyes Can’t keep this pipe lit, keep sucking tobacco.
Spit again!
Seven days out and the scope showed Ikky.
Bells jangled, feet pounded, and some optimist set the thermostat in the Hopkins. Malvern wanted me to sit out, but I slipped into my harness and waited for whatever came. The bruise looked worse than it felt. I had exercised every day and the shoulder hadn stiffened on me.
A thousand meters ahead and thirty fathoms deep, it tunneled our path.
Nothing showed on the surface.
“Will we chase him?” asked an excited crewman.
“Not unless she feels like using money for fuel.” I shrugged.
Soon the scope was clear, and it stayed that way. We remained on alert and held our course.
I hadn’t said over a dozen words to my boss since the last time we went drowning together, so I decided to raise the score.
“Good afternoon,” I approached. “What’s new?”
“He’s going north-northeast. We’ll have to let this one go. A few more days and we can afford some chasing. Not yet.”
Sleek head ...
I nodded. “No telling where this one’s headed.”
“How’s your shoulder?”
“All right. How about you?” Daughter of Lir ...
“Fine. By the way, you’re down for a nice bonus.”
Eyes of perdition!
“Don’t mention it,” I told her back.
Later that afternoon, and appropriately, a storm shattered. (I prefer “shattered” to “broke.” It gives a more accurate idea of the behavior of tropical storms on Venus and saves lots of words.) Remember that inkwell I mentioned earlier? Now take it between thumb and forefinger and hit its side with a hammer. Watch yourself!. Don’t get splashed or cut-Dry, then drenched. The sky one million bright fractures as the hammer falls. And sounds of breaking.
“Everyone below?” suggested loudspeakers to the already scurrying crew. Where was I? Who do you think was doing the loudspeaking?
Everything loose went overboard when the water got to walking, but by then no people were loose. The Slider was the first thing below decks.
Then the big lifts lowered their shacks.
I had hit it for the nearest Rook with a yell the moment I recognized the pre-brightening of the holocaust. From there I cut in the speakers and spent half a minute coaching the track team.
Minor injuries had occurred, Mike told me over the radio, but nothing serious. I, however, was marooned for the duration. The Rooks do not lead anywhere; they’re set too far out over the hull to provide entry downwards, what with the extensor shelves below So I undressed myself of the tanks which I had worn for the past several hours, crossed my flippers on the table, and leaned back to watch the hurricane. The top was black as the bottom and we were in between, and somewhat illuminated because of all that flat, shiny space. The waters above didn’t rain down—they just sort of got together and dropped.
The Rooks were secure enough—they’d weathered any number of these onslaughts—it’s just that their positions gave them a greater arc of rise and descent when Tensquare makes like the rocker of a very nervous grandma. I had used the belts from my rig to strap myself into the bolted-down chair, and I removed several years in purgatory from the soul of whoever left a pack of cigarettes in the table drawer.
I watched the water make teepees and mountains and hands and trees until I started seeing faces and people. So I called Mike.
“What are you doing down there?”
“Wondering what you’re doing up there,” he replied. “What’s it like?”
“You’re from the Midwest, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Get bad storms out there?”
“Sometimes.”
“Try to think of the worst one you were ever in. Got a slide rule handy?”
“Right here.”
“Then put a one under it, imagine a zero or two following after, and multiply the thing out.”
“I can’t imagine the zeros.”
“Then retain the multiplicand—that’s all you can do.”
“We’ll see.”
“That’s all I do. If she wants a Slideman she’s going to have to ask nicely.”
“You think she’ll have to?”
“I think she’ll have to.”
“And if she does, can you do it?”
“A fair question,” I puffed. “I don’t know the answer, though.”
I’d incorporate my soul and trade forty percent of the stock for the answer. I’d give a couple years off my life for the answer. But there doesn’t seem to be a lineup of supernatural takers, because no one knows. Supposing when we get out there, luck being with us, we find ourselves an Ikky?
Supposing we succeed in baiting him and get lines on him. What then?
If we get him shipside, will she hold on or crack up? What if she’s made of sterner stuff than Davits, who used to hunt sharks with poison-darted air pistols? Supposing she lands him and Davits has to stand there like a video extra.
Worse yet, supposing she asks for Davits and he still stands there like a video extra or something else—say, some yellowbellied embodiment named Cringe?
It was when I got him up above the eight-foot horizon of steel and looked out at all that body, sloping on and on till it dropped out of sight like a green mountain range ... And that head. Small for the body, but still immense. Fat, craggy, with lidless roulettes that had spun black and red since before my forefathers decided to try the New Continent. And swaying.
Fresh narco-tanks had been connected. It needed another shot, fast.
But I was paralyzed.
It had made a noise like God playing a Hammond organ ....
And looked at me!
I don’t know if seeing is even the same process in eyes like those. I doubt it. Maybe I was just a gray blur behind a black rock, with the plexi-reflected sky hurting its pupils. But it fixed on me. Perhaps the snake doesn’t really paralyze the rabbit, p perhaps it’s just that rabbits are cowards by constitution. But it began to struggle and I still couldn’t move, fascinated.
Fascinated by all that power, by those eyes, they found me there fifteen minutes later, a little broken about the head and shoulders, the Inject still unpushed.
And I dream about those eyes. I want to face them once more, even if their finding takes forever. I’ve got to know if there’s something inside me that sets me apart from a rabbit, from notched plates of reflexes and instincts that always fall apart in exactly the same way whenever the proper combination is spun.
Looking down, I noticed that my hand was shaking. Glancing up, I noticed that no one else was noticing.
I finished my drink and emptied my pipe. It was late and no songbirds were singing.
I sat whittling, my legs hanging over the aft edge, the chips spinning down into the furrow of our wake. Three days out. No action.
“You!”
“Me ?”
Hair like the end of the rainbow, eyes like nothing in nature, fine teeth. “Hello.”
“There’s a safety rule against what you’re doing, you know.”
“I know. I’ve been worrying about it all morning.”
A delicate curl climbed my knife then drifted out behind us. It settled into the foam and was plowed under. I watched her reflection in my blade, taking a secret pleasure in its distortion.
“Are you baiting me?” she finally asked.
I heard her laugh then, and turned, knowing it had been intentional.
“What, me?”
“I could push you off from here, very easily.”
“I’d make it back.”
“Would you push me off, then—some dark night, perhaps?”
“They’re all dark, Miss Luharich. No, I’d rather make you a gift of my carving.”
She seated herself beside me then, and I couldn’t help but notice the dimples in her knees. She wore white shorts and a halter and still had an offworld tan to her which was awfully appealing. I almost felt a twinge of guilt at having planned the whole scene but my right hand still blocked her view of the wooden animal.
“Okay, I’ll bite. What have you got for me?”
“Just a second. It’s almost finished.”
Solemnly, I passed her the wooden jackass I had been carving. I felt a little sorry and slightly jackass-ish myself, but I had to follow through. I always do. The mouth was split into a braying grin. The ears were upright.
She didn’t smile and she didn’t frown. She just studied it.
“It’s very good,” she finally said, “like most things you do—and appropriate, perhaps.”
“Give it to me.” I extended a palm.
She handed it back and I tossed it out over the water. It missed the white water and bobbed for awhile like a pigmy seahorse.
“Why did you do that?”
“It was a poor joke. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe you are right, though. Perhaps this time I’ve bitten off a little too much.”
I snorted.
“Then why not do something safer, like another race?” She shook her end of the rainbow. “No. It has to be an Ikky.” Why? “Why did you want one so badly that you threw away a fortune?”
“Many reasons,” I said. “An unfrocked analyst who held black therapy sessions in his basement once told me, ‘Mister Davits, you need to reinforce the image of your masculinity by catching one of every kind of fish in existence.” Fish are a very ancient masculinity symbol, you know. So I set out to do it. I have one more to go. Why do you want to reinforce your masculinity?”
“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t want to reinforce anything but Luharich Enterprises. My chief statistician once said, ‘Miss Luharich, sell all the cold cream and face powder in the System and you’ll be a happy girl. Rich, too.” And he was right. I am the p roof. I can look the way I do and do anything, and I sell most of the lipstick and face powder in the System—but I have to be able to do anything.”
“You do look cool and efficient,” I observed.
“I don’t feel cool,” she said, rising. “Let’s go for a swim.”
“May I point out that we are making pretty good time?”
“If you want to indicate the obvious, you may. You said you could make it back to the ship, unassisted. Change your mind?”
“Then get us two scuba outfits and I’ll race you under Tensquare.”
“I’ll win, too,” she added.
I stood and looked down at her, because that usually makes me feel superior to women.
“Daughter of Lir, eyes of Picasso,” I said, “you’ve got yourself a race.
Meet me at the forward Rook, starboard, in ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes,” she agreed.
And ten minutes it was. From the center blister to the Rook took maybe two of them, with the load I was carrying. My sandals grew very hot and I was glad to shuck them for flippers when I reached the comparative cool of the corner.
We slid into harnesses and adjusted our gear. She had changed into a trim one-piece green job that made me shade my eyes and look away, then look back again.
I fastened a rope ladder and kicked it over the side. Then I pounded on the wall of the Rook.
“Yeah?”
“You talk to the port Rook, aft?” I called.
“They’re all set up,” came the answer. “There’s ladders and drag-lines all over that end.”
“You sure you want to do this?” asked the sunburnt little gink who was her publicity man, Anderson yclept.
He sat beside the Rook in a deckchair, sipping lemonade through a straw.
“It might be dangerous,” he observed, sunken-mouthed. (His teeth were beside him, in another glass.) “That’s right,” she smiled. “It will be dangerous. Not overly, though.”
“Then why don’t you let me get some pictures? We’d have them back to Lifeline in an hour. They’d be in New York by tonight. Good copy.”
“No,” she said, and turned away from both of us. She raised her hands to her eyes. “Here, keep these for me.”
She passed him a box full of her unseeing, and when she turned back to me they were the same brown that I remembered.
“Ready?”
“No,” I said, tautly. “Listen carefully, Jean. If you’re going to play this game there are a few rules. First,” I counted, “we’re going to be directly beneath the hull, so we have to start low and keep moving. If we bump the bottom, we could rupture an air tank .... “ She began to protest that any moron knew that and I cut her down.
“Second,” I went on, “there won’t be much light, so we’ll stay close together, and we will both carry torches.”
Her wet eyes flashed.
“I dragged you out of Govino without—” Then she stopped and turned away. She picked up a lamp.
“Okay. Torches. Sorry.”
“... And watch out for the drive-screws,” I finished. “There’ll be strong currents for at least fifty meters behind them.”
She wiped her eyes again and adjusted the mask. “All right, let’s go.”
We went.
She led the way, at my insistence. The surface layer was pleasantly warm. At two fathoms the water was bracing; at five it was nice and cold. At eight we let go the swinging stairway and struck out.
Tensquare sped forward and we raced in the opposite direction, tattooing the hull yellow at ten-second intervals.
The hull stayed where it belonged, but we raced on like two darkside satellites. Periodically, I tickled her frog feet with my light and traced her antennae of bubbles. About a five meter lead was fine; I’d beat her in the home stretch, but I couldn’t let her drop behind yet.
Beneath us, black. Immense. Deep. The Mindanao of Venus, where eternity might eventually pass the dead to a rest in cities of unnamed fishes. I twisted my head away and touched the hull with a feeler of light; it told me we were about a quarter of the way along.
I increased my beat to match her stepped-up stroke, and narrowed the distance which she had suddenly opened by a couple meters. She sped up again and I did, too. I spotted her with my beam.
She turned and it caught on her mask. I never knew whether she’d been smiling. Probably. She raised two fingers in a V-for-Victory and then cut ahead at full speed.
I should have known. I should have felt it coming. It was just a race to her, something else to win. Damn the torpedoes!
So I leaned into it, hard. I don’t shake in the water. Or, if I do it doesn’t matter and I don’t notice it. I began to close the gap again.
She looked back, sped on, looked back. Each time she looked it was nearer, until I’d narrowed it down to the original five meters.
Then she hit the jatoes.
That’s what I had been fearing. We were about halfway under and she shouldn’t have done it. The powerful jets of compressed air could easily rocket her upward into the hull, or tear something loose if she allowed her body to twist. Their main use is in tearing free from marine plants or fighting bad currents. I had wanted them along as a safety measure, because of the big suck-and-pull windmills behind.
She shot ahead like a meteorite, and I could feel a sudden tingle of perspiration leaping to meet and mix with the churning waters.
I swept ahead, not wanting to use my own guns, and she tripled, quadrupled the margin.
The jets died and she was still on course. Okay, I was an old fuddyduddy. She could have messed up and headed toward the top.
I plowed the sea and began to gather back my yardage, a foot at a time.
I wouldn’t be able to catch her or beat her now, but I’d be on the ropes before she hit deck.
Then the spinning magnets began their insistence and she wavered. It was an awfully powerful drag, even at this distance. The call of the meat grinder.
I’d been scratched up by one once, under the Dolphin, a fishing boat of the middle-class. I had been drinking, but it was also a rough day, and the thing had been turned on prematurely. Fortunately, it was turned off in time, also, and a tendon-stapler in made everything good as new, except in the log, where it only mentioned that I’d been drinking.
Nothing about it being off-hours when I had a right to do as I damn well pleased.
She had slowed to half her speed, but she was still moving crosswise, toward the port, aft corner. I began to feel the pull myself and had to slow down. She’d made it past the main one, but she seemed too far back. It’s hard to gauge distances under water, but each red beat of time told me I was right. She was out of danger from the main one, but the smaller port screw, located about eighty meters in, was no longer a threat but a certainty.
She had turned and was pulling away from it now. Twenty meters separated us. She was standing still. Fifteen.
Slowly, she began a backward drifting. I hit my jatoes, aiming two meters behind her and about twenty back of the blades.
Straightline! Thankgod! Catching, softbelly, lead pipe on shoulder swim-like HELL! maskcracked, not broke though X*eD UP!
We caught a line and I remember brandy.
Into the cradle endlessly rocking I spit, pacing. Insomnia tonight and left shoulder sore again, so let it rain on me—they can cure rheumatism. Stupid as hell. What I said. In blankets and shivering.
She: “Carl, I can’t say it.” Me: “Then call it square for that night in Govino, Miss Luharich. Huh?” She: nothing. Me: “Any more of that brandy?” She: “Give me another, too.” Me: sounds of sipping. It had only lasted three months. No alimony. Many $ on both sides. Not sure whether they were happy or not. Wine-dark Aegean. Good fishing.
Maybe he should have spent more time on shore. Or perhaps she shouldn’t have. Good swimmer, though. Dragged him all the way to Vido to wring out his lungs. Young. Both. Strong. Both. Rich and spoiled as hell. Ditto. Corfu should have brought them closer.
Didn’t. I think that mental cruelty was a trout. He wanted to go to Canada. She: “Go to hell if you want!” He: “Will you go along?” She: “No.” But she did, anyhow. Many hells. Expensive. He lost a monster or two. She inlier ited a couple. Lot of lightning tonight. Stupid as hell. Civility’s the coffin of a conned soul. By whom?—Sounds like a bloody neo-ex But I hate you, Anderson, with your glass full of teeth and her new eyes Can’t keep this pipe lit, keep sucking tobacco.
Spit again!
Seven days out and the scope showed Ikky.
Bells jangled, feet pounded, and some optimist set the thermostat in the Hopkins. Malvern wanted me to sit out, but I slipped into my harness and waited for whatever came. The bruise looked worse than it felt. I had exercised every day and the shoulder hadn stiffened on me.
A thousand meters ahead and thirty fathoms deep, it tunneled our path.
Nothing showed on the surface.
“Will we chase him?” asked an excited crewman.
“Not unless she feels like using money for fuel.” I shrugged.
Soon the scope was clear, and it stayed that way. We remained on alert and held our course.
I hadn’t said over a dozen words to my boss since the last time we went drowning together, so I decided to raise the score.
“Good afternoon,” I approached. “What’s new?”
“He’s going north-northeast. We’ll have to let this one go. A few more days and we can afford some chasing. Not yet.”
Sleek head ...
I nodded. “No telling where this one’s headed.”
“How’s your shoulder?”
“All right. How about you?” Daughter of Lir ...
“Fine. By the way, you’re down for a nice bonus.”
Eyes of perdition!
“Don’t mention it,” I told her back.
Later that afternoon, and appropriately, a storm shattered. (I prefer “shattered” to “broke.” It gives a more accurate idea of the behavior of tropical storms on Venus and saves lots of words.) Remember that inkwell I mentioned earlier? Now take it between thumb and forefinger and hit its side with a hammer. Watch yourself!. Don’t get splashed or cut-Dry, then drenched. The sky one million bright fractures as the hammer falls. And sounds of breaking.
“Everyone below?” suggested loudspeakers to the already scurrying crew. Where was I? Who do you think was doing the loudspeaking?
Everything loose went overboard when the water got to walking, but by then no people were loose. The Slider was the first thing below decks.
Then the big lifts lowered their shacks.
I had hit it for the nearest Rook with a yell the moment I recognized the pre-brightening of the holocaust. From there I cut in the speakers and spent half a minute coaching the track team.
Minor injuries had occurred, Mike told me over the radio, but nothing serious. I, however, was marooned for the duration. The Rooks do not lead anywhere; they’re set too far out over the hull to provide entry downwards, what with the extensor shelves below So I undressed myself of the tanks which I had worn for the past several hours, crossed my flippers on the table, and leaned back to watch the hurricane. The top was black as the bottom and we were in between, and somewhat illuminated because of all that flat, shiny space. The waters above didn’t rain down—they just sort of got together and dropped.
The Rooks were secure enough—they’d weathered any number of these onslaughts—it’s just that their positions gave them a greater arc of rise and descent when Tensquare makes like the rocker of a very nervous grandma. I had used the belts from my rig to strap myself into the bolted-down chair, and I removed several years in purgatory from the soul of whoever left a pack of cigarettes in the table drawer.
I watched the water make teepees and mountains and hands and trees until I started seeing faces and people. So I called Mike.
“What are you doing down there?”
“Wondering what you’re doing up there,” he replied. “What’s it like?”
“You’re from the Midwest, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Get bad storms out there?”
“Sometimes.”
“Try to think of the worst one you were ever in. Got a slide rule handy?”
“Right here.”
“Then put a one under it, imagine a zero or two following after, and multiply the thing out.”
“I can’t imagine the zeros.”
“Then retain the multiplicand—that’s all you can do.”
