Exile-and Glory (21 page)

When we got the blow-hole above water, Jill let out a long whistle of breath and started breathing again. She was thrashing around feebly, unable to keep herself above water without help. The only blood I could see was from an irregular tear just below her fin, whether shark-bite or just abrasion from the sandpaper sides of the blue shark I couldn't tell.

Hank played another tune on his call-box and Jumbo darted away from us, swimming in a big circle that kept widening before coming back and making clicking grunts. "No more sharks in sight," Hank translated. He stuck his helmet down below the surface and shouted. "Hose-nose!"

"Yes, sir." The kid's voice was faint but we could hear it. I couldn't make out any expression in it, but I could imagine what the boy was thinking. He was well-trained, to stay down there while his father brought his friend—Jill was certainly more than a pet—up to the surface.

"Go get help. Jumbo will stay with us."

"Yes, sir." There was a pause. "Is Jill all right?"

"She's alive. Get going."

"Yes, sir."

I heard the sled motor start up, a high-pitched whine, and then it receded. We were alone up there, saturated with nitrogen and holding up a bleeding dolphin, while more sharks might come around at any moment. I thought I remembered that blues hunt alone. I also remembered that sharks can smell blood for miles.

"All right, get back down to forty feet," Hank ordered. "Jumbo and I'll hold her up. Stay five minutes and then come up and relieve me. Your lance is still armed, isn't it?"

"Yes. OK." I let air out of the buoyancy compensator and sank slowly. It didn't need two to hold up the dolphin. At least not two men; Jumbo was doing most of the work anyway, but he couldn't quite hold Jill alone. It took someone on the other side to do that, to keep her from rotating and falling away.

The five minutes took forever, then I surfaced again. Hank made more noises on his call-box, sending Jumbo on another long patrol out around us. When the dolphin returned, Hank gave me his place. He seemed a bit grey and sweaty under his faceplate and I thought he had a touch of the bends, or an embolism, or both. The only thing we could do for that was to get him down again, and I pointed emphatically. He nodded.

"Thanks," he said. Then he sank out of sight, and I was alone on the surface.

Not really alone, I decided. There was Jumbo on the other side of our burden, and Sarah just under us, still clicking and whistling but not so plaintively now. Jumbo clicked at her, and she was quiet. There were swells, about five feet high, with tiny whitecaps on them, and it was hard to hold the dolphin upright so the blow-hole was above water. I kept getting salt water into my mask and it was hard to clear. I was still on tanks; a snorkel would have been flooded. The sun was hot, but the water was only warm, friendly, comfortable except for the waves. I cursed them.

We floated there, Jumbo and I, holding up the wounded dolphin, and I thought about Hank Shields. We'd worked well together, and the only mistake had been mine. A stupid one at that. Shields had been a good man. He was doing a good job here at Dansworth. He wasn't hurting anyone. He and the work at Dansworth were helping make life better for people in the States.

That wasn't a profitable way of thinking. Shields was a goddam traitor. He'd run out on the team. Maybe what he was doing now was more important, but that wasn't my decision.

Jumbo made more sounds at me, but I couldn't understand them.
"No comprende,"
I said, then laughed at myself. For some reason I'd used a language foreign to me, thinking Jumbo might know that. Of course he wouldn't understand any language I knew. Except perhaps English. "I don't understand," I said as clearly as I could.

"OK," the dolphin replied. It was quite clear and distinct. He began nudging Jill, and she responded a bit, moving her tail about to help keep herself above water. She breathed noisily. After a while she could hold herself up with only a little help. I pointed out toward the sea and made a big circular movement with my arm. "Sharks?" I called.

Jill clicked something that sounded scared. Sarah clicked back.

"No. OK," Jumbo said. Again it was quite clear enough to understand. He darted away, leaving me to hold Jill with her help. He tore off in a big circle and stayed out there a long time. When he got back, he made clicking noises.

"Another shark out there," I heard. "Probably a lot of them. They'll eat the dead one first." This wasn't from the dolphin but it took a moment to realize I was hearing Hank's voice from seventy feet down. "I can't come up, I'm afraid. Can you hold on?"

"Sure!" I called. I wondered. But Jumbo was racing around us in a tight circle now, and I had my lance. I took the bright red ribbon hanging on the safety pin and pulled it out, then held the lance warily. The thing was as dangerous to humans and dolphins as it was to sharks.

I thought about the sharks. Come to blood from miles away. Eat each other. Stupid, single-minded killers. I didn't like the thought.

After a while I saw Hank rising from below. He hadn't given me any warning, and my lance was pointed slantingly downward, just where he'd come up, the point probably invisible because he'd be looking up at the bright surface and the lance was shadowed by the dolphin and her daughter . . . .

It was simple. An accident, and no questions. He was swimming badly, and I was sure he was suffering, how bad I couldn't tell.

An accident. No witnesses. Terminate with extreme prejudice. He was almost to the point of my lance now. A tiny movement and he'd be a closed file entry—

No. He was a goddam traitor, but he'd fought to keep the dolphin alive. He'd earned that much. The sharks might come back, and I'd need him. The Job could come later. Right now, I wasn't risking the dolphin. It made an ironic joke, because my supervisor hates dolphins more than he hated Hank Shields.

"Get your ass down there under pressure!" I shouted. "You're in no goddam condition to come to the top." I shifted the lance point so that it missed him. "And give me warning when you come up. You almost impaled yourself."

He looked at me funny. It was a knowing look, and it said a lot. I frowned. "Get below!"

He sank back down without a word. A Navy recovery boat with a compression chamber reached us about twenty minutes later, but it was only ten minutes before a whole school of angry dolphins was around us, looking for sharks to kill. They found two.

They let Hank come home for dinner. He'd suffered a painful emphysema, but nothing permanent. We ate dinner in the Shield's apartment pressurized to fifty feet. It was a quiet dinner, and afterwards he sent the boy off to his room.

"Thanks," he said. "Don't think I could have saved Jill by myself. The babies always die if they lose their mothers, and Sarah's the best prospect we've ever had. You did a good job of work today."

"So did you."

"I try. Maybe I'll earn my way back into the human race."

Before I could say anything, Judy came back into the room. She looked at Hank sprawled out in a reclining chair and clucked at him. A bubble had formed inside his chest cavity, and another under the skin at his neck. Recompression forced them back into solution, and now we were paying the penalty by being confined while the pressure was slowly reduced. It wasn't really a problem, since large parts of Dansworth stay under pressure all the time.

"Guess you can't take me diving tomorrow," I said.

"No. Surgeon says it'll be a week. I expect you don't want to go without me," Hank said slowly. "Be no point to it. Right?"

I looked up sharply. Judy was frowning, not really understanding. I couldn't keep from watching her. She reminded me of my sister, all right, but even more of the last girl I'd really been serious about. The one I'd driven away because of the Job. It would be easy to be in love with her, and she was going to be alone pretty soon.

"We'll dive together next week," Hank said. "Can't put it off forever. If I don't take you, there'll be somebody else show up for the same dive. Right?"

"Yes." So he understood. I wondered what had given me away.

"We're pretty heavily insured here," Hank said slowly.

"The Navy pays staggering premiums, but our families are well provided for if there's an accident." He saw Judy about to say something, and continued, "So if you haven't filled out the forms yet, you ought to. You'll be covered, be a pity if you haven't set things up properly. Morbid subject, of course. Let's change it."

We did, talking about dolphins, and about sea farms and the power plants. And sharks.

"They adapt," Hank said. "We've tried the lot. Electric signals, noises, chemicals—nothing stops them all. But most avoid this place. The dolphins hunt them. If sharks weren't so stupid, they wouldn't come around at all; but there're so many fish here, and the wastes from the processing plant can't be completely disposed of without getting some blood and guts in the water. We were upcurrent of that, and usually the sharks don't come there. I doubt it would have attacked us anyway, except for Sarah. Baby dolphin's a tasty dish to a shark."

Judy shuddered. "I've never seen a shark attack," she said. "But Hank, you were out of your mind to take Albert out beyond the perimeter. Close to the Station we've always got plenty of dolphins on patrol, but out there with just Jumbo—I wish you wouldn't take the boy out that far again."

"I won't," he said. He stood and put his arm lightly around her. "It's been a good five years," he said. He wasn't talking to anyone in particular. He kissed her. "I'm a little tired. Gideon, if you'll excuse me, I'm sure Judy can entertain you—"

"No, of course not," I said, and went off to my own room. I had a lot to think about, and I didn't want Judy's company just then. I wasn't sure I wanted my own.

They put me through a week of training before they'd let me take a deep dive to the mine sites. It was another week after that before the surgeons would let Hank go with me.

We went down in a concrete shaft that contained a series of elevators. Every hundred feet we'd have to get out and pass through a pressure tight door. Not only did the pressures change at each depth, but the gas mixtures as well, and at the third we had to put on our hearing aids.

They weren't really hearing aids, of course. They were tiny computers and electronic speech-filtering devices. The gas mixtures used to let men live at the lower depths and higher pressures contained a lot of helium, and a man talking in a helium-oxygen mixture sounds like Donald Duck. Some of the old-timers could understand each other without hearing aids, or claimed to, but most people can't make out a word.

The hearing aids take that gobble-gobble and suppress some of the frequencies while amplifying others, so that the result sounds like normal speech in a flat monotone. It's impossible to get much expression into a voice, but you can be intelligible.

We went on down until we were at the lowest level, 780 feet below the surface. There was a large structure there, with laboratories and quarters for the workmen, mostly Navy people.

It was also cold. They heated the structures, and they had plenty of power to do it with, but helium conducts heat better than normal air. You feel heat losses and feel them fast. When we went outside we'd need heated wet suits too. The water at that depth is quite cold.

The first couple of days we took it easy, going out with a gang of Navy men to watch the mining operations. They were just getting started good, sinking shafts into the sides of the Seamount, taking samples for the scientists as they dug. Everybody was excited about what they were learning. This was the United States' first chance to catch up with the big international corporations who had a big edge in undersea mining technology.

On the third day we went out alone. It was dark and gloomy except where our lights pointed, and there were ghastly streaks of phosphorescence everywhere. It reminded me of some big city, deserted at night, and it had the same air of indefinable menace. The dolphins couldn't come with us, although Jumbo and Fonso were overhead, and once in a while one or the other would dive down to our level, chatter at Hank for a second and get a reply from his belt call-box, then head back topside. The depth was extreme for dolphins, Hank said, and although they were breathing surface air rather than high-pressure stuff as we did, so they could go up and down without decompression problems, at that depth nitrogen will go into solution quite rapidly; the dolphins had to watch out for embolisms and bends themselves.

It wasn't quiet down there, and we weren't alone. There were hundreds of tiny clicking sounds, which I didn't understand until Hank took me to the Seamount itself and I saw little shrimp, or things that looked like them, scuttling along on the bottom. They made snapping noises with their pincers.

There were also things like eels, not very large, and strange-looking fish, also small. The real deep-bottom monsters are much farther down, of course, down where men can't get to them without bathyscaphes and protective equipment; but these were strange enough. There was one thing about seven inches long, dark blue in the yellow-glaring lights, and it seemed to be all teeth and eyes. I'm told it can swallow fish larger than itself. Nothing seemed interested in us one way or another.

We could get quite close to the fish—not that I'd want to touch any of them. It was a fascinating scene, but a little scary, and the knowledge that anything going wrong with the gear would kill us instantly didn't help. I don't like situations where I have to rely on equipment some unknown tech has made.

We swam around the bottom until we were out of sight of the lights of the station and mining operations. The top of the Seamount was fairly flat, and rocky, scoured clean of mud, with small pebbles between the larger rocks. Even down this far were anemones and barnacles with feathery flowers waving gently in the current. Once in a while larger fish up to a couple of feet long would cruise by. I kept watching for squid or octopus, but I didn't see any.

There was a light far ahead of us and Hank waved me toward it. We cruised gently along, conserving energy. The rebreather apparatus didn't even leave bubbles behind, and despite our lights nothing paid much attention to us; I began to feel like a ghostly intruder, unable to affect anything, an observer in a plane of existence I didn't belong to.