Bells jangled, feet pounded, and some optimist set the thermostat in the Hopkins. Malvern wanted me to sit it 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't 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 a lot 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 the 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 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 form 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."
"So what are you doing up there?"
"I've strapped myself in the chair. I'm watching things roll around the floor right now."
I looked up and out again. I saw one darker shadow in the forest.
"Are you praying or swearing?"
"Damned if I know. But if this were the Slider--if only this were the Slider!"
"_He's out there?_"
I nodded, forgetting that he couldn't see me.
Big, as I remembered him. He'd only broken surface for a few moments, to look around. _There is no power on Earth that can be compared with him who was made to fear no one._ I dropped my cigarette. It was the same as before. Paralysis and an unborn scream.
"You all right, Carl?"
He had looked at me again. Or seemed to. Perhaps that mindless brute had been waiting half a millennium to ruin the life of a member of the most highly developed species in business....
"You okay?"
...Or perhaps it had been ruined already, long before their encounter, and theirs was just a meeting of beasts, the stronger bumping the weaker aside, body to psyche....
"Carl, dammit! Say something!"
He broke again, this time nearer. Did you ever see the trunk of a tornado? It seems like something alive, moving around in all that dark. Nothing has a right to be so big, so strong, and moving. It's a sickening sensation.
"Please answer me."
He was gone and did not come back that day. I finally made a couple of wisecracks at Mike, but I held my next cigarette in my right hand.
The next seventy or eighty thousand waves broke by with a monotonous similarity. The five days that held them were also without distinction. The morning of the thirteenth day out, though, our luck began to rise. The bells broke our coffee-drenched lethargy into small pieces, and we dashed from the gallery without hearing what might have been Mike's finest punchline.
"Aft!" cried someone. "Five hundred meters!"
I stripped to my trunks and started buckling. My stuff is always within grabbing distance.
I flipflopped across the deck, girding myself with a deflated squiggler.
"Five hundred meters, twenty fathoms!" boomed the speakers.
The big traps banged upward and the Slider grew to its full height, m'lady at the console. It rattled past me and took root ahead. Its one arm rose and lengthened.
I breasted the Slider as the speakers called, "Four-eight, twenty!"
"Status Red!"
A belch like an emerging champagne cork and the line arced high over the waters.
"Four-eight, twenty!" it repeated, all Malvern and static. "Baitman, attend!"
I adjusted my mask and hand-over-handed it down the side. Then warm, then cool, then away.
Green, vast, down. Fast. This is the place where I am equal to a squiggler. If something big decides a baitman looks tastier than what he's carrying, then irony colors his title as well as the water about it.
I caught sight of the drifting cables and followed them down. Green to dark green to black. It had been a long cast, too long. I'd never had to follow one this far down before. I didn't want to switch on my torch.
But I had to.
Bad! I still had a long way to go. I clenched my teeth and stuffed my imagination into a straightjacket.
Finally the line came to an end.
I wrapped one arm about it and unfastened the squiggler. I attached it, working as fast as I could, and plugged in the little insulated connections which are the reason it can't be fired with the line. Ikky could break them, but by then it wouldn't matter.
My mechanical eel hooked up, I pulled its section plugs and watched it grow. I had been dragged deeper during this operation, which took about a minute and a half. I was near--too near--to where I never wanted to be.
Loathe as I had been to turn on my light, I was suddenly afraid to turn it off. Panic gripped me and I seized the cable with both hands. The squiggler began to glow, pinkly. It started to twist. It was twice as big as I am and doubtless twice as attractive to pink squiggler-eaters. I told myself this until I believed it, then I switched off my light and started up.