A great wave was humping up ahead; over or through? That was the problem, and Hunter usually made the wrong decision. He aimed the nose of the board slightly downward, took a deep breath, and squeezed the throttle controls.
A curving green wall rose above his head, and he slipped effortlessly through its surface into the roaring underwater world. For a few seconds the wave tugged him landward; then he was beyond its power and an instant later emerged, shaking the water from his eyes, on the other side.
He looked round for Bombora, but there was no time to locate her, for here came another wave, its wind-ripped crest hissing like a giant snake. Again he dived into the luminous green underworld, feeding the tiny hydrojets a three-second jolt of power.
He had almost lost count of the waves that had gone storming by when suddenly he was in quiet water, rising and falling on a gentle swell. Swinging the board around he looked back toward the coast-and swallowed hard
when he saw the huge, humped shoulders of the moving, liquid hills that now separated him from solid land. Where was Bombora?
Then he saw that the skimmer had used her speed to take a longer but smoother route out to sea, and had avoided the line of surf. He also saw that Mario was signaling to him-perhaps warning him not to attempt to shoot those waves. If the Aussies were nervous, he was certainly going to take no chances; he relaxed on the board, and waited.
Bombora came whistling up to him in a cloud of spray; and then, with a sinking heart, he saw that Mario was holding out the telephone.
“Call from Washington,” said the senior Lombini, as he cut the engines and Bombora settled down on her floats. “I told them you weren’t here, but it was no good.”
He handed over the cordless receiver, and Hunter, still bobbing up and down on the board, heard the peremptory voice from the other side of the world. He answered dully: “Yes, sir-I’ll be there at once,” and then gave the instrument back to Mario.
Being the number one propulsion specialist of the Space Agency had its disadvantages. His holiday was over almost before it had begun, and the Lombini brothers would have to finish the development and marketing of the Squid. Worse still, his trip out to the Great Barrier Reef with Helena was also off, and he’d have to cancel their reservation on Heron Island.
Perhaps it was just as well, combining business with pleasure was seldom a very good idea. But that, he knew, was only sour grapes.
Twenty-two thousand miles above the earth, aboard Intelsat VIII, Jack Kimball had been rather more fortunate. It was not too easy to find privacy aboard the great floating raft which now handled most of the communications traffic of the Pacific area, but he and Irene Martinson had managed it, with most satisfactory results.
The ribald speculations which had grown with the Space Age were not altogether ill-founded. In the total absence of weight, some of the more exuberant fantasies of Indian temple art had moved into the realm of practical politics; one did not have to be an athlete to surpass anything that the ingenious sculptors of the great Konarak Temple at Puri had been able to contrive. And it was an interesting fact-which the psychologists had not overlooked-that reproductions of such art were rather popular in all the larger, permanently inhabited space stations.
There were those who argued that sex in zero gee was tantalizing, and not wholly satisfying. One school of thought insisted on at least a third of a gravity-which meant that its advocates would be happy on Mars, but permanently discontented on the Moon. As Kimball filed away his memories for future reference, he decided that those who felt this way had too many inhibitions, or too little ingenuity. Neither charge applied to him.
When they were both presentable again, he unlocked the door of the spacesuit storage locker. As he did so, Irene started giggling.
“Just suppose,” she said, “that there’d been an emergency and everyone came rushing in here for suits.”
“Well,” grinned Jack, “we should have had a head start. When are you off duty again?”
Before she could reply, the corridor speaker cleared its throat and said firmly: “Dr. Kimball-please report to Control.”
“Oh no!” gasped Irene. “You don’t suppose they had a mike in there?!”
“If there is,” said Kimball ominously, “we’re not the ones in trouble. I have to authorize all circuit changes, and I’m damned if I ever said anything about mikes in suit lockers.”
He realized, a little belatedly, that Irene might have a different point of view. Before she could express it, he kissed her firmly, said, “Give me a couple of minutes to get clear,” and dived through the door.
Two hours later, just as he was about to reenter atmosphere, he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to say goodbye. Oh well, he would have to phone from Washington.
There were fewer complications that way.
Dr. Kelvin Poole was a hundred feet down, in the Cornell Underwater Lab off Bimini, when he received his orders. Like all aerospace physiologists, he was fascinated by the problems of submarine existence, but he had a particular reason for returning to the sea. His specialty was the study of sleep and the rhythms which seemed to control the activities of all living creatures. In the open sea, and at depths where the sunlight never penetrated, those rhythms were disturbed; it even appeared that some fish never slept at all, and Kelvin Poole wanted to know how they managed this remarkable feat.
He was supposed to be working, but the view from the window was not only distractingly beautiful-it was hypnotically restful. The water was so clear that he could see almost two hundred feet, and at a guess his field of view contained ten thousand fish of fifty different species-as well as several dozen varieties of coral. At this depth though the sunlight was still brilliant, it had lost all its red and orange hues; the world of the reef was tinged a mellow bluish- green, very soothing to the eyes. It looked incredibly peaceful-an underwater Eden that knew nothing of sin or death.
Nor was that wholly an illusion, now that the sun was still high. From time to time a barracuda or a shark would go patrolling past, without creating the slightest concern or alarm among its myriad of potential victims. During all the daylight hours while he had been staring out of the window of the biology lab, Poole had never once seen one fish attack or eat another. Only at dawn and sunset was the truce suspended, and the reef became the scene of a thousand brief and deadly battles.
He was watching one of the submarine scooters returning to the garage fifty feet away, towing plankton nets and recording gear behind it, when the telephone rang. Switching off the centrifuge that was rather noisily separating some protein samples, he picked up the receiver and answered, “Poole here.”
He listened carefully for a minute, sometimes nodding his head in agreement, occasionally pursing his lips in disapproval.
“Of course,” he said at last. “It’s perfectly practical- you’ve read my report. There’s an element of risk-but I’m still fit, and I’ve done it seven-no, eight-times. But why the rush? . . . Well, if that’s the way it is . . . Yes, of course, I can fly to Washington in an hour, if you have a jet here-but there’s one big snag.”
He looked at the roof overhead, and contemplated the hundred feet of water above the metal shell of the lab. On dry land, he could walk that distance in twenty seconds- but he had been down here, living at a pressure of four atmospheres, for almost a month.
This was going to be rather hard to explain. No one had ever found a safe way of accelerating the decompression process; Poole had seen the “bends” just once in his life, and he had a hearty respect for this dreaded divers’ sickness. He had no intention of turning his bloodstream into soda water, or even risking a single bubble of compressed air in some inconvenient artery.
One could not argue with the laws of physics, Washington would simply have to accept the rather surprising facts.
It was going to take him just as long to ascend through that mere hundred feet of water above his head, as it would to come homeward from the Moon.
WITH OPEN HANDS
At first, there was some criticism of the risks being taken, but this slowly faded with the passage of time. The world began to appreciate the skill and care that were being poured into the mission, and to realize that this was no desperate, do-or-die stunt. At every opportunity, the astronauts themselves expressed full confidence in success; and they were the ones whose opinions really mattered.