"If you want to indicate the obvious, you may. You said you could make it back to the ship, una.s.sisted. Change your mind?"
"No."
"Then get us two scuba outfits and I"ll race you under Tensquare.
"I"ll win, too," she added.
I stood and looked down at her, because that usually makes me feel superior to women.
"Daughter of Lir, eyes of Pica.s.so," I said, "you"ve got yourself a race. Meet me at the forward Rook, starboard, in ten minutes."
"Ten minutes," she agreed.
And ten minutes it was. From the center blister to the Rook took maybe two of them, with the load I was carrying. My sandals grew very hot and I was glad to shuck them for flippers when I reached the comparative cool of the corner.
We slid into harnesses and adjusted our gear. She had changed into a trim one-piece green job that made me shade my eyes and look away, then look back again.
I fastened a rope ladder and kicked it over the side. Then I pounded on the wall of the Rook.
"Yeah?"
"You talk to the port Rook, aft?" I called.
"They"re all set up," came the answer. "There"s ladders and draglines all over that end."
"You sure you want to do this?" asked the sunburnt little gink who was her publicity man, Anderson yclept.
He sat beside the Rook in a deckchair, sipping lemonade through a straw.
"It might be dangerous," he observed, sunken-mouthed. (His teeth were beside him, in another gla.s.s.)
"That"s right," she smiled. "It _will_ be dangerous. Not overly, though."
"Then why don"t you let me get some pictures? We"d have them back to Lifeline in an hour. They"d be in New York by tonight. Good copy."
"No," she said, and turned away from both of us.
"Here, keep these for me."
She pa.s.sed him a box full of her unseeing, and when she turned back to me they were the same brown that I remembered.
"Ready?"
"No," I said, tautly. "Listen carefully, Jean. If you"re going to play this game there are a few rules. First," I counted, "we"re going to be directly beneath the hull, so we have to start low and keep moving. If we b.u.mp the bottom, we could rupture an air tank..."
She began to protest that any moron knew that and I cut her down.
"Second," I went on, "there won"t be much light, so we"ll stay close together, and we will _both_ carry torches."
Her wet eyes flashed.
"I dragged you out of Govino without--"
Then she stopped and turned away. She picked up a lamp.
"Okay. Torches. Sorry."
"...And watch out for the drive-screws," I finished. "There"ll be strong currents for at least fifty meters behind them."
She wiped her eyes and adjusted the mask.
"All right, let"s go."
We went.
She led the way, at my insistence. The surface layer was pleasantly warm. At two fathoms the water was bracing; at five it was nice and cold. At eight we let go the swinging stairway and struck out. Tensquare sped forward and we raced in the opposite direction, tattooing the hull yellow at ten-second intervals.
The hull stayed where it belonged, but we raced on like two darkside satellites. Periodically, I tickled her frog feet with my light and traced her antennae of bubbles. About a five meter lead was fine; I"d beat her in the home stretch, but I couldn"t let her drop behind yet.
Beneath us, black. Immense. Deep. The Mindanao of Venus, where eternity might eventually pa.s.s the dead to a rest in cities of unnamed fishes. I twisted my head away and touched the hull with a feeler of light; it told me we were about a quarter of the way along.
I increased my beat to match her stepped-up stroke, and narrowed the distance which she had suddenly opened by a couple of meters. She sped up again and I did, too. I spotted her with my beam.
She turned and it caught on her mask. I never knew whether she"d been smiling. Probably. She raised two fingers in a V-for-Victory and then cut ahead at full speed.
I should have known. I should have felt it coming. It was just a race to her, something else to win. d.a.m.n the torpedos!
So I leaned into it, hard. I don"t shake in the water. Or, if I do it doesn"t matter and I don"t notice it. I began to close the gap again.
She looked back, sped on, looked back. Each time she looked it was nearer, until I"d narrowed it down to the original five meters.
Then she hit the jatoes.
That"s what I had been fearing. We were about half-way under and she shouldn"t have done it. The powerful jets of compressed air could easily rocket her upward into the hull, or tear something loose if she allowed her body to twist. Their main use is in tearing free from marine plants or fighting bad currents. I had wanted them along as a safety measure, because of the big suck-and-pull windmills behind.
She shot ahead like a meteorite, and I could feel a sudden tingle of perspiration leaping to meet and mix with the churning waters.
I swept ahead, not wanting to use my own guns, and she tripled, quadrupled the margin.
The jets died and she was still on course. Okay, I was an old fuddyduddy. She _could_ have messed up and headed toward the top.
I plowed the sea and began to gather back my yardage, a foot at a time.
I wouldn"t be able to catch her or beat her now, but I"d be on the ropes before she hit deck.
Then the spinning magnets began their insistence and she wavered. It was an awfully powerful drag, even at this distance. The call of the meat grinder.
I"d been scratched up by one once, under the _Dolphin_, a fishing boat of the middle-cla.s.s. I _had_ been drinking, but it was also a rough day, and the thing had been turned on prematurely. Fortunately, it was turned off in time, also, and a tendon-stapler made everything good as new, except in the log, where it only mentioned that I"d been drinking. Nothing about it being off-hours when I had the right to do as I d.a.m.n well pleased.
She had slowed to half her speed, but she was still moving cross-wise, toward the port, aft corner. I began to feel the pull myself and had to slow down. She"d made it past the main one, but she seemed too far back. It"s hard to gauge distances under water, but each red beat of time told me I was right. She was out of danger from the main one, but the smaller port screw, located about eighty meters in, was no longer a threat but a certainty.