by Hal Clement
Evidently he realized this, for after a few more seconds it went out. I expected to see him leave like his fellow, since he could do no more good by sticking, but he wasn’t thinking along those lines. He had different ideas, and one of them from his viewpoint was a very good one. I didn’t like it so much.
The dual-phase stuff they make pressure tanks out of isn’t a metal, and differs widely from any metal in its elastic properties; but like metals, if you hit it, it makes a noise. I didn’t know what my rider started hitting with, but it most certainly made a noise. I, from inside, can vouch for that. A nice, steady, once-a-second tapping resounded from the tank, hurting my ears and doing worse to my plans. He didn’t need his light; any work sub could home in on that noise from miles away if it had even a decent minimum of instrumentation.
And there was no way that I could think of to stop him.
Chapter Five
I could try the legs, of course. I did. It was so dark by now, with the light from entrance pit and tent roof alike faded to the barest glimmer, that he may not even have known that I did anything. If he’d been holding on by a leg he may have been disconcerted when I pulled it in and maybe bruised when I popped it out again, but there was no evidence that anything of the sort happened. I ran the legs through their cycle several times without making the slightest change in the rhythm of that tapping.
I tried shifting my weight to make the tank roll over. It worked, but didn’t bother my passenger. Why should it? A swimmer doesn’t care whether he’s right side up or not, and a submarine hitchhiker in total darkness should care even less. I was the only one who was bothered.
But why was this character alive, conscious and active? We’d risen more than a thousand feet now, through a pressure difference that should have popped his suit if it were really sealed as tightly as I had judged. If it weren’t, and if he were valving off gas to keep his lung volume down, he was going to be in trouble when he descended again; and in any case, volume or no volume troubles, whether he was breathing helium or anything else, he should by now be completely helpless with embolisms.
The simple sad fact, independent of what should be, was that he was still going strong, and I had no way of getting rid of him.
Nothing like this had been foreseen by the Board geniuses who had worked out this mission. There was not the slightest doubt that some sort of sub was going to be along shortly to pick me up — no other notion was sane, in view of the fact that this fellow had been fit to stick with me. There were always insane notions to consider, of course; maybe he had decided to sacrifice his life to make sure I didn’t get back to the surface, but even that assumed the coming of something. Maybe a torpedo, but something. Personally I doubted the sacrifice idea. Lots of people will, for a cause they consider important enough, but I’ve never met a lawbreaker who acted that way. Especially I’ve never seen an energy waster who would; selfishness is the key word with those lads — keep the eye out for Number One.
But never mind the psychology; what’s to be done? The guy may be a moving corpse, but he’s still there broadcasting. Why didn’t I come down in a work sub? Skip that question; it’s a waste of good thinking time. How can I make him get off, or at least stop making noise?
Badly phrased question. I can’t make him do anything. He’s outside, and I’m inside, and with his pressure difference never the twain shall meet. Then, how can I persuade him to leave or shut up? Until I start communicating, I can’t persuade him either. Obvious.
I put on my lights, both inside and out. That at least caught the fellow’s attention; the tapping stopped for a moment. Then it resumed, but less regularly, and I caught glimpse’s of him as he worked his way to a place which would let him see through one of the ports. I pulled my own face far enough back from it so that he could see me clearly, and for a few seconds we just looked at each other. The tapping stopped again.
It was the same man who had found the tank. I’m not a mind reader, but I felt pretty sure from his expression that he had only just realized there was anyone inside and that the discovery bothered as well as surprised him. He resumed his banging on the tank, in a much more irregular pattern. After a few seconds I realized that he must be sending some sort of code, though I couldn’t read it.
I tried to explain my gestures that the racket was hurting my ears, but all he did was shrug. If he cared at all about my comfort, it certainly wasn’t at the top of his priority list. He finished his code message at last and resumed the regular tapping. He didn’t seem angry — didn’t scowl, or shake a fist at me, or anything of that sort, but he didn’t look as though he considered me a long-lost friend, either. I could see his face clearly and without distortion through the helmet, but I could see no sign of real interest in his expression. I spent some time trying to get him to respond to my gestures, but he paid no attention. I thought of writing a note that he could read through the port, though I couldn’t guess what languages he might know, and I managed to find some scraps of paper in one of my pockets; but I could find nothing to write with, and that idea collapsed. I finally gave up and turned my lights off again. There was no use in helping him guide the sub to us.
I couldn’t think of any more practical plans, and my mind wandered back to the question of how the fellow lived. We had risen several hundred more feet during the time the lights were on, and his suit hadn’t emitted a single bubble. I was beginning to wonder whether it really was an ambient-pressure unit. It was hard to see how anything so thin, and especially so flexible, could possibly be pressure armor; on the other hand, the peculiarities of the tent roof indicated that someone had been making progress in molecular architecture. I was in no position to say such armor was impossible, but I wished I could make at least a vague guess as to how it was done.
I can feel a little silly about it now, of course. I’d had the man in full sight, well lighted, only a few feet away from me for fully five minutes, and I missed the key fact — not in something I saw but in something I didn’t see. At least, I’m not alone in my folly.
The tapping kept up. It wasn’t really loud enough to be painful, but it was annoying, Chinese water torture style. It may have been equally so to the. fellow outside who was doing it, and I got a little consolation out of the thought that at least he was having to work at it. I got a little more out of the realization that as long as he did keep it up the help he was calling hadn’t arrived yet.
Two thousand feet was less than halfway to the surface, though it was an unbelievable pressure change for my hitchhiker. It wasn’t very much comfort to me to know that I’d put that much water under me; even twice as much wouldn’t be much help. It wasn’t as though there’d be a police squadron standing by to pick me up, or even a single boat. The tank had only the normal automatic transmitters for calling help, and they wouldn’t even start to function until I reached the surface — which I was unlikely to do. There probably was a Board vessel within a few miles, since the plan didn’t include my navigating the open halves of the tank to Easter Island when I got back to the surface, but that would do me no immediate good. The storm would probably still be going on, and they wouldn’t be able to see me at fifty yards. If they did, they probably couldn’t do anything about it unless there were more specialized salvage gear aboard than seemed likely. Even a minor ocean storm is quite a disturbance, and one doesn’t pick a pressure tank bobbing around on its waves casually out of the water.-
There was an encouraging side to that thought, though. If I did get to the surface, it would also be hard for any sub to get hold of the tank. My broadcaster would then be working, and maybe — just maybe — if it even brought a Board ship into the general neighborhood the pursuers would keep out of sight. On the other hand, it was at least equally likely that they would consider it worth every effort to get hold of me, witnesses or no witnesses, in view of what I had obviously seen down below. But the other hope was worth holding onto for its comfort value. Since I’m a civilized human being, I never thought until later
of the possibility that if they couldn’t capture me they might just punch a hole in the tank and let me sink.
Maybe I’d make it. The minutes were passing. It was taking each one a year to do it, but they were passing. Each brought me nearly two hundred feet closer to those storm waves, if they were still there. I hadn’t bothered to check the forecast beyond the time I was scheduled to submerge, and I’d been down quite a few hours. I’m not immune to seasickness by any means, but I rather hoped there would still be enough wave action to give me a good dose of it this time. Maybe it would even make my friend just outside lose his grip on whatever he was holding onto. That was something else to hope for.
But first I’d have to get up to those waves, and there was still half a mile to go. The tapping went on. If I’d been anywhere else on Earth I might have preferred the Chinese water drops by then, but this was no place to be asking for water drops. I tried to shut out the sound and keep my attention on other things, like the pressure gauge — was there a little wiggle in its needle which might be due to the wave action far above — or the question of food. If the waves were there, maybe I’d better put off eating.
I kept moving from one port to another in a hectic but rather useless effort to spot the sub which must be approaching; but it was my passenger who saw it first.
Chapter Six
I knew what had happened when the regular tapping suddenly changed once more to the complex code, but it took me another half minute to spot the approaching light. I didn’t have a very wide angle of view from any one of the ports.
All I could see at first was the light, a solitary spark on a space-dark background, but there could be no doubt what it was. It was just a little below us, well to one side. Its bearing changed as it grew brighter. Apparently it was approaching on a spiral course, holding the sound of the tapping at a constant angle off its bow to let the pilot keep a constant idea of his distance from the source.
Even when it was close I had trouble making it out, for its main spotlight was turned straight on the tank and there was too little diffused radiance to show anything close to it. This apparently bothered my passenger, too, for there was another burst of code tapping as the sub halted thirty yards away, and the light went out. In its place a dozen smaller beams illuminated the whole area, none of them shining directly our way; so I could see the newcomer fairly well.
It was not exactly like any sub I’d seen before, but was similar enough to some of them to give my eyes a handle. It was small, either one or two men, not built for speed, and well equipped with manipulation gear on the outside — regular arm and hand extensions, grapples, bits, probes, and what looked like a water-jet digger. One of my hopes died quickly; there had been a chance that a small sub would not have enough negative buoyancy to drag the tank back down, but this fellow had big, fat lift chambers and must have ballast to match. It was evidently a tug, among other things. If it could get hold of me, it could pull me down, all right; and it was hard to see how it could be kept from getting that hold. All I had to fend it off were the legs.
I wasn’t sure how effective these could be, but I kept my fingers at the panel resolved not to miss anything that looked like a good chance. At least, now that some sort of action was in the offing, I wasn’t dithering as I had been during the minutes before the sub came in sight.
The pilot’s first method was to drift above me and settle down. He must have had a strong streak of showoff in him, since it was hard to imagine a less efficient means of sinking a round object. I thought he’d have his troubles, but my passenger didn’t seem upset, and I have to admit the character knew his boat handling. The swimmer waved him into position, putting me under the sub’s center of buoyancy, and he made contact. My pressure gauge promptly showed that the upward motion had been reversed.
I waited a few seconds in the hope that my hitchhiker would go inside the sub, but he made no motion to, and I finally had to let him see my technique. This was simple enough — simpler than rolling along the sea bottom, since the surface above me was much smoother. Also, I didn’t have to go so far to accomplish something; a very small shift away from his center of gravity gave my tank’s lift a torque that was too much either for his reaction time or his control jets. Since he had enough weight in his tanks to overcome my own lift, he flipped over, and I was on my way up again.
Unfortunately, as I promptly learned, Lester the Limpet was still with me. His tapping started up within seconds of the time I got out from under. His friend evidently took a while to get his machine back into trim — I could understand that; tumbling, with a couple of tons of surplus negative buoyancy thrown in, is a problem for any sub — but he was back all too soon. He was no longer in a mood to show off; he bored straight in, with a grapple extended.
I turned on my outside lights, partly to make things harder for him and partly so that I could see better myself. This was going to be tricky for both of us; he had to find something the mechanical hand could grip, and I had to shift my own body weight so as to turn the tank enough to bring a leg into line for what I had in mind. It was just as well I’d gotten my recent practice on the bottom. At least I knew to a hair where each leg went out, relative to the positions of the ports.
I took him by surprise the first time. He hadn’t considered all the possibilities of those legs — maybe he didn’t even know how many I could use, though they were visible enough from the outside. He matched my upward drift very nicely, though I was able to hamper him a little bit by shifting my weight and changing the frontal presentation of the slightly irregular tank. With relative vertical motion practically zero, he came in slowly with the mechanical hand reaching for some projection or other — I couldn’t tell what he had in mind. I rolled just a little to get a leg in line with the grapple, and when the latter was about two feet from contact I snapped the leg out.
The spring was strong. Remember, it was built to prop the tank in position on a slope even when the ballast was still attached. The engineers who built it could tell you how many pounds of shove it gave. I can’t, but I could feel it. The sub and tank were pushed neatly away from each other. The line of thrust was not exactly through the center of my shell, and I got quite a bit of spin out of it. The sub didn’t. Either the push was better centered on him or he was quicker this time with his control jets.
He was a stubborn character. He came back and tried the same thing again, after my spin had stopped. I was able to repeat, with about the same results. Konrad the Chiton was still with me, though, and he had my technique figured out by this time. He moved a little away from me to free his hands for signaling, waved them for about ten seconds in a complicated pattern that meant nothing to me, and then came back and took hold of the tank once more.
The sub made another approach, similar to the preceding two, and I tried to line up for another kick. My friend, however, had different ideas. He was much farther from the center than I was, and could exert much more torque. He could also see where the legs were, and when I shifted my weight to line up the proper one with the approaching grapple he interfered. He was too smart to fight me directly, though he probably could have managed it; instead, he let me get moving and then supplied an extra shove to one side so that I either overshot or missed the right position. I made three attempts to line up as the hand was coming in and finally gave the kick a little out of line when the sub was about to make contact. The leg grazed the side of the handler and put a little spin on the tank, but didn’t hit anything solid enough to push us apart. Worse, it gave the sub operator a chance to grab the leg itself. This he seemed to feel was a better hold than whatever he had planned on; he clamped on tightly and began to cut buoyancy once more.
This proved to be a mistake, though it didn’t help me as much as it might have. The leg wasn’t strong enough to hold the tank down. It parted, and once more the sub disappeared below me. I cut my lights promptly, hoping that my passenger had lost his hold with the jerk. Maybe he did, but if so he wasn’t far enough away to
lose track of me. In a few seconds the tapping resumed, and in a few more the lights of the sub were close enough to make my blackout an idle gesture. I turned mine back on again so that I could see to resume the sparring match.
Now he got the idea of making his approach toward the spot where the leg had been lost, so that I’d have to turn further to bring another into line. My swimming friend was co-operating nobly, and for a little while I was afraid they had me. The sub operator was too smart to try for a leg again, but he managed to keep out of the way of several kicks I gave out. He got in, made what should have been a successful grab at something on my outer surface, but was hurried and missed. He had to back up for another try… and I had time to get another idea into operation.
I knew where the swimmer was. I could see enough of him to tell not only that but to guess which way he’d be pushing next time. I began to put a spin on the tank with him at one pole so that he wouldn’t notice it quite so quickly. This worked, though I didn’t get a really rapid rotation — I couldn’t, of course, with such poor torque; but with the tank’s weight I had enough for what I wanted. One of my strong points in basic physics, ages ago in school, was mechanics. I couldn’t handle the present problem quantitatively because I didn’t know either my angular speed or the tank’s moment of inertia, but I hit the qualitative answer on the button. As the grapple approached again I shifted my weight to start the tank processing. Billy Barnacle tried his usual stunt of pushing me sideways and sent the leg right through the point I wanted. Either he’d forgotten what they’d taught him about gyroscopes or he was getting tired. I hit the grapple dead center with my kick, and we were apart again. If I’d been driving that sub, I’d have been getting tired of the whole business by now.
Apparently he was more patient than I. He was back again all too soon.
