Hal Clement - Space Lash

“And Heaven knows how long to find and take care of all the radios. Neither of us is an expert in that field, and we'll be a long time making sure we have left no loopholes.”

“Will you at least stop to find out whether the air renewers in these diving suits are indefinite-time ones, like the spacesuit equipment? And if they aren't, let me change back into my spacesuit?”

“Of course. Change anyway. It will save my trying to get the sub-stance of this conversation across to Mr. Silbert. You can tell him on radio while we are on the way. Come with me back to the sphere and change. Brenda, stay here.”

“But, dearest — this isn't right. You know…"

“I know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. I'm willing to follow your lead in a lot of things, Bren, but this is not one of them.” “But…"

“No buts. Come, Mr. Bresnahan. Follow me.”

The wife fell silent, but her gaze was troubled as she watched the two men vanish through the tiny lock. Bresnahan wondered what she would do. It was because he felt sure she would do something that he hadn't simply defied Weisanen.

The woman's face was no happier when the computerman emerged alone and swam back to a point beside her. Her husband was visible through the port, outsized helmet removed, beckoning to her.

For a moment Bresnahan had the hope that she would refuse to go. This faded as she swam slowly toward the sphere, occasionally looking back, removed the anchor in response to a gesture from the man inside, and disappeared through the lock. The vehicle began to drift upward, vegetation near it swirling in the water jets. Within a minute it had faded from view into the darkness.

“Just what's going on here?” Silbert's voice was clear enough; the suit radios carried for a short distance through water. “Where are they going, and why?”

“You didn't hear any of my talk with Weisanen?”

“No. I was busy, and it's hard to get sound through this helmet any-way. What happened? Did you argue with him?”

“In a way.” Bresnahan gave the story as concisely as he could. His friend's whistle sounded eerily in the confines of his helmet.

“This — is — really — something. Just for the record, young pal, we are in a serious jam, I hope you realize.”

“I don't think so. His wife is against the idea, and he'll let himself get talked out of it — he's a little afraid of the results already.”

“Not the point. It doesn't matter if the whole thing was a practical joke on his part. They're out of sight, in a medium where no current charts exist and the only navigation aids are that sphere's own sonar units. He could find his way back to the core, but how could he find us?”

“Aren't we right under the lock and the station? We came straight down.”

“Don't bet on that. I told you — there are currents. If we made a straight track on the trip down here I'll be the most surprised man inside Luna's orbit. There are twenty million square feet on this mudball. We'd be visible from a radius of maybe two hundred — visible and recognizable, that is, with our lights on. That means they have something like two hundred search blocks, if my mental arithmetic is right, without even a means of knowing when they cover a given one a second time. There is a chance they'd find us, but not a good one — not a good enough one so that we should bet your chance of dodging a couple of weeks of weightlessness on it. When that nut went out of sight, he disposed of us once and for all.”

“I wouldn't call him a nut,” Bresnahan said.

“Why not? Anyone who would leave a couple of people to starve or get loaded with zero-gee symptoms on the odd chance that they might blab his favorite scheme to the public…"

“He's a little unbalanced at the moment, but not a real nut. I'm sure he didn't realize he'd passed the point of no return. Make allowances, Bert; I can. Some of my best friends are married, and I've seen 'em when they first learned a kid was on the way. It's just that they don't usually have this good a chance to get other people in trouble; they're all off the beam for a little while.”

“You're the most tolerant and civilized character I've met, and you've just convinced me that there can be too much of even the best of things. For my money the guy is a raving nut. More to the point, unless we can get ourselves out of the jam he's dropped us into, we're worse than nuts. We're dead.”

“Maybe he'll realize the situation and go back to the station and call for help.”

“There can be such a thing as too much optimism, too. My young friend, he's not going to get to the station.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because the only laser tube not already in the station able to trigger the cobweb launchers is right here on my equipment clip. That's another reason I think he's a nut. He should have thought of that and pried it away from me somehow.”

“Maybe it just means he wasn't serious about the whole thing.”

“Never mind what it means about him. Whatever his intentions, I'd be willing to wait for him to come back to us with his tail between his legs if I thought he could find us. Since I don't think he can, we'd better get going ourselves.”

“Huh? How?”

“Swim. How else?”

“But how do we navigate? Once we're out of sight of the core we'd be there in the dark with absolutely nothing to guide us. These little lights on our suits aren't…"

“I know they aren't. That wasn't the idea. Don't worry; I may not be able to swim in a straight line, but I can get us to the surface eventually. Come on; five miles is a long swim.”

Silbert started away from the glow, and Bresnahan followed uneasily. He was not happy at the prospect of weightlessness and darkness combined; the doses on the trip down, when at least the sphere had been present for some sort of orientation, had been more than sufficient.

The glow of the core faded slowly behind them, but before it was too difficult to see Silbert stopped.

“All right, put your light on. I'll do the same; stay close to me.” Bresnahan obeyed both orders gladly. “Now, watch.”

The spaceman manipulated valves on his suit, and carefully ejected a bubble of air about two feet in diameter. “You noticed that waste gas from the electrolyzers in the diving suits didn't stay with us to be a nuisance. The bubbles drifted away, even when we were at the core,” he pointed out. Bresnahan hadn't noticed, since he wasn't used to paying attention to the fate of the air he exhaled, but was able to remember the fact once it was mentioned.

“That of course, was not due to buoyancy, so close to the core. The regular convection currents started by solar heat at the skin must be responsible. Therefore, those currents must extend all the way between skin and core. We'll follow this bubble.”

“If the current goes all the way, why not just drift?”

“For two reasons. One is that the currents are slow — judging by their speed near the skin, the cycle must take over a day. Once we get away from the core, the buoyancy of this bubble will help; we can swim after it.

“The other reason is that if we simply drift we might start down again with the current before we got close enough to the skin to see daylight.

“Another trick we might try if this takes too long is to have one of us drift while the other follows the bubble to the limit of vision. That would establish the up-down line, and we could swim in that direction for a while and then repeat. I'm afraid we probably couldn't hold swimming direction for long enough to be useful, though, and it would be hard on the reserve air supply. We'd have to make a new bubble each time we checked. These suits have recyclers, but a spacesuit isn't built to get its oxygen from the surrounding water the way that diving gear is.”