"Yes, but at least I sleep well," Chippawa said pointedly.

Faraday grimaced. "It always feels like there's a sumo wrestler sitting on my chest whenever I lie down," he said. "I just can't sleep on these things."

"You'll get used to it," Chippawa assured him. "Somewhere around your fifth or sixth tether ride."

"If I last that long," Faraday said. "When did we pick up that humming noise?"

"About two hours ago," Chippawa said. "Prime thinks it's the wind hitting some sort of resonance with the tether."

Involuntarily, Faraday glanced up at the cabin ceiling. "Terrific," he said. "You ever hear of the Tacoma-Narrows Bridge?"

"I took the same physics courses you did," Chippawa reminded him. "Saw the same old vids, too.

But this isn't that same kind of resonance."

"You hope," Faraday said, tapping a fingernail surreptitiously on the polished myrtlewood finger ring his mother had given him when he graduated from high school. Not that he was superstitious or anything; but the image of that bridge twisting and swinging in the breeze as the wind caught it just right, and eventually coming completely apart, had haunted him ever since he saw it. "They will keep an eye on it, I presume?"

"What, with two hundred million dollars' worth of equipment on the line?" Chippawa asked, waving around. "Not to mention you and me?"

"Right." Taking another sip, Faraday gave the status board a quick check. Outside temperature was still climbing, wind speed was manageable, atmospheric composition was still mostly hydrogen with a pinch each of helium and methane mixed in. Hull pressure...

He winced and looked away. They were already at twenty bars, the equivalent of nearly two hundred meters below sea level on Earth.

Two hundred meters was nothing to an Earthbound bathyscaph, of course. But then, an Earthbound bathyscaph didn't also have to put up with heavy radiation and a magnetic field that could unscrew the ratchets on a socket wrench.