Hal Clement Ocean on Top

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apparently improving his knowledge of the finger language with the assistance
of our same old followers, the girl and her friends
- two of them, anyway. I couldn't have told which was the missing one.
I had boiled everything down to one sentence on the pad and showed this to him
the moment I was close enough.
'Marie says she'll go if you'll change back and go with her.'
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He stared at it for a full half minute without even moving to take it from my
hand. Then he suddenly snatched it and, without clearing the writing swam off
down the tunnel toward the sub. The rest of us followed. He streaked over to
the conning port where her face was still visible and held up the pad with my
words still on it. She looked at it. He pointed at me and back at the pad and
put on an expression which anyone, regardless of cultural background, could
have read. She answered aloud.
'That's it, Bert.' He cleared the page, looking at her in a puzzled fashion.
'Why?' he wrote.
'I may explain later. Will you come?'
His answer startled Marie. I wasn't sure what it did to me.
'Sure. I may have to come back later - there's useful work to do down here.
But it might be best if I
went with you now anyway. There's a lot to be reported that there hasn't been
time for either of us to tell you.' I thought that was a pretty tactful way of
passing off her refusal to listen to him all those weeks. 'I could make a more
thorough job of it.' He paused in thought, even longer than it took Marie to
read the sentences. Then he went on, 'We'll tow your sub to the operating room
- it'll be easier that way than for you to pilot it - and connect it to the
lock. I'll go in and get de-pressurized. They won't argue too hard. I can come
in through your lock then, and we can go back up together.' He turned to me
and added the word, 'Okay?'
I wasn't sure it was okay. Without Bert I wouldn't be able to do anything
useful, as far as I could see.
No doubt the girl who was still watching us, and her friends, might be willing
to keep me from starving until I learned my way around. They might even guide
me back to where I could work with Joey, if that was to be my main occupation;
but I couldn't see what use I'd be to the Board that way. I hope it's been
obvious that I never intended my residence to be permanent, as Joey apparently
had. I hadn't been lying to Marie about that.
There was no use suggesting that I go back with the two of them. The sub
wouldn't take us. It was built
for one, and crowding Bert in would be hard enough.
Then I remembered that Bert's own sub should still be around somewhere. I
grabbed the pad.
'Why can't we all go back?' I wrote. 'Your boat must still be here, too. If
Marie feels so strongly about having you in hers, I could still use yours. You
can still come down again, or both of us can, if the job
seems to call for it.'
It seemed like a fine idea to me, and even Marie appeared to approve of it,
but Bert had a question or two. I had to admit he raised good points.
'The operating room will handle only one at a time. Once I'm done, there'll be
communication trouble during your own depressurization.'
'You could explain the whole program to them first. For that matter, I could
go through it first.'
'I'm not sure I could explain it too well. Remember, I'm no expert in this
finger-wiggling.'
'But why couldn't I go first, with you directing which sub was to be
connected, and so on, until it was your turn?'
'You could, I suppose. We'd better check my boat, though. It's been here a
long time and been used for regular work here. The flotation system will
certainly need going over. I'm not sure I'd like to risk it against pressure
differential myself, but we'll see. We'd better check that first.'
Marie had been reading our conversation and nodded approval, so our flock went
off to look over the vessel.
He was right. The flotation liquid was completely gone. It hadn't been used
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even locally for months, since there were no facilities for making the
hydrocarbon its buoyancy tanks were designed to use. The local machines used
the same sort of low-density solid employed in the swimming coveralls; it
would have involved major structural changes to put that into the submarine.
No one had considered it worth the trouble.
'I could use one of the local boats,' I suggested when this became clear.
'Don't try it until you learn the language,' was the rejoinder. That seemed a
little silly. A sub is a sub, and you either understand them or you don't. A
look into one of them educated me, though.
I still don't see why their control panels are made that way; the laws of
physics are the same down here as up above. Apparently the difference in basic
thinking which goes with that weird graphic language extends into more factors
than mere common sense would lead anyone to expect.
It began to look as though the other two were going back alone. Bert seemed
quite resigned to it, and even I was getting that way. When we went back to
Marie with the word, though, she came up with another of her ideas. I've come
to suspect since then that she had something more in her mind than just
getting me back to the surface, just as she had when she insisted on Bert's
going along, but she didn't confide in me. Of course, that may have been
because there was no way for her to speak to me alone.
'There's plenty of spare buoyancy in my tanks,' she pointed out suddenly and
firmly. 'Just attach that wreck of Bert's to my tow-lugs, and we can haul it
along. You say the hull's sound enough to hold against the pressure when you
pump it down again.'
Bert seemed startled, no doubt because he hadn't thought of that himself. That
was my suspicion, anyway. But he promptly agreed; and so it was settled. He
went off to get help in towing the subs and to arrange for the operating room,
and I took advantage of his absence to write a remark to Marie.
'You seem to have been wrong about Bert. He certainly took you up fast enough
on that test suggestion.'
'So I noticed.'
I waited for further comment, but got none. I suppose I should have known
better than to expect any.
When she did speak again, it was on a wholly different subject - I thought. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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