Ishihara's voice was barely audible over the wind now that the hatch was open, but occasional words drifted back to the divers. “Six hundred… as you go…four…three…”
“I see it,” Winkle cut in. “I'll take her.” He called over his shoulder again, “Farrell…Stubbs…we're coming up on one. You'll spot it in a minute. I'll tell you when I lose it under the bow.”
“Yes, sir,” acknowledged Farrell. “See it yet, Rick?”
“Not yet,” was the response. “Nothing but jellyfish.”
“Fifty meters,” called the captain. “Now thirty.” He cut the water jets to a point where steerage way would have been lost if such a term had meant anything to the Shark, and continued to inch forward. “Twenty.”
“I see it,” called Stubbs.
“All right,” answered the captain. “Ten meters. Five. It's right under me; I've lost it. Con me, diver.”
“About five meters, sir. It's dead center…four…three…two…all right, it's right under the hatch. Magnets ready, Gil?”
The magnetic grapple was at the forward end of its rail, directly over the hatch, so Dandridge was ready; but Winkle was not.
“Hold up…don't latch on yet. Stubbs, watch the fish; are we drifting?”
“A little, sir. It's going forward and a little to port…now you're stopping it…there.”
“Quite a bit of wind,” remarked the captain as his fingers lifted from the hydrojet controls. “All right. Pick it up.”
“Think the magnets will be all right, Marco?” asked Dandridge. “That whale looks funny to me.” The mechanic joined the winchman and divers at the hatch and looked down at their floating problem.
At first glance the “whale” was ordinary enough. It was about two meters long, and perfectly cigar-shaped except where the intake ring broke the curve some forty centimeters back of the nose. The exhaust ports, about equally far from the tail end, were less visible since they were merely openings in the dark gray skin. Integument and openings alike were hard to see in detail, however; the entire organism was overgrown with a brownish, slimy-looking mass of filaments reminiscent both of mold and of sealskin.
“It's picked up something, all right,” Mancini conceded. “I don't see why your magnets shouldn't work, though… unless you'd rather they didn't get dirty.”
“All right. Get down the ladder and steer 'em, Rick.” Dandridge caused a light alloy ladder to extend from the bow edge of the hatch as he spoke; then he fingered another switch which sent the grapples themselves slowly downward. Stubbs easily beat them to the foot of the ladder, hooked one leg through a rung, reached out with both arms and tried to steady the descending mass of metal. The Shark was pitching somewhat in the swell, and the eighty pounds of electromagnet and associated wiring was slightly rebellious. The youngest of the crew and the only nonspecialist among its members — he was still working off the two-year labor draft requirement which preceded higher education — Rick Stubbs got at least his share of the dirty work. He was not so young as to complain about it.
“Slower…slower…twenty c's to go…ten…hold it now… just a touch lower all right, juice!” Dandridge followed the instructions, fed current to the magnets, and started to lift,
“Wait!” the boy on the ladder called almost instantly. “It's not holding!”
The mechanic reacted almost as fast.
“Bring it up anyway!” he called. “The infection is sticking to the magnets. Let me get a sample!” Stubbs shrank back against the ladder as the slimy mass rose past him. In response to Mancini's command. Dandridge grimaced with distaste as it came above deck level and into his view.
“You can have it!” he remarked, not very originally.
Mancini gave no answer, and showed no sign of any emotion but interest. He had slipped back into his lab as the material was ascending, and now returned with a two-liter flask and the biggest funnel he possessed.
“Run it aft a little,” he said briefly. “That's enough…I'll miss some, and it might as well fall into the water as onto the deck.” The grapple, which had crawled a few inches toward him on its overhead rail, stopped just short of the after edge of the hatch. Mancini, standing unconcernedly at the edge of the opening with the wind ruffling his clothes, held funnel and flask under the magnets.
“All right, Gil, drop it,” he ordered. Dandridge obeyed.
Most of the mess fell obediently away from the grapple. Some landed in the funnel and proceeded to ooze down into the flask; some hit Mancini's extended arm without appearing to bother him; a little dropped onto the deck, to the winchman's visible disgust. Most fell past Stubbs back into the sea.
The mechanic took up some of the material from his arm and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. “Gritty,” he remarked. “And the magnets held this stuff, but not the whale's skeleton. That means that most of the skeleton must be gone, and I bet this grit is magnetite. I'll risk a dollar that this infection comes from that old 775-Fe-DE6 culture that got loose a few years ago from Passamaquoddy. I'll give it the works to make sure, though. You divers will have to use slings to get the fish aboard, I'm afraid.”
“Rick, I'll send the magnets down first and you can rinse 'em off a bit in the water. Then I'll run out the sling and you can get it around the whale.”
“All right, sir. Standing by.” As the grapple went down again Dandridge called to the mechanic, who had turned back toward the lab.
“I suppose the whale is ruined, if you're right about the infection. Can we collect damages?” Mancini shook his head negatively.
“No one could collect from DE: they went broke years ago — from paying damages. Besides, the courts decided years ago that injury or destruction of a piece of pseudolife was recoverable property damage only if an original model was involved. This fish is a descendant of a model ten years old; it was born at sea. We didn't make it and can't recover for it.” He turned to his bench, but flung a last thought over his shoulder. “My guess that this pest is a DE escapee could be wrong, too. They worked out a virus for that strain a few months after it escaped, and I haven't heard of an iron infection in four years. This may be a mutation of it — that's still my best guess — but it could also be something entirely new.” He settled himself onto a stool and began dividing the material from the flask into the dozens of tiny containers which fed the analyzers.
In the water below, Stubbs had plunged from the ladder and was removing slime from the grapple magnets. The stuff was not too sticky, and the grit which might be magnetite slightly offset the feeling of revulsion which the boy normally had for slimy materials, so he was able to finish the job quickly enough to keep Dandridge happy. At Rick's call, the grapple was retracted; a few moments later the hoist cable came down again with an ordinary sling at its extremity. Stubbs was still in the water, and Farrell had come part way down the ladder. The chief diver guided the cable down to his young assistant, who began working the straps around the torpedo-like form which still bobbed between the Shark's hulls.
It was quite a job. The zeowhale was still slippery, since the magnets had not come even close to removing all the foreign growth. When the boy tried to reach around it to fasten the straps it slithered away from him. He called for more slack and tried to pin it against one of the hulls as he worked, but still it escaped him. He was too stubborn to ask for help, and by this time Farrell was laughing too hard to have provided much anyway.