It was very, very quiet. I knew water was going by because the depth was increasing about two feet a second, but I couldn’t hear it. Any loose pieces of the boat were long gone, floatables being scattered over the Pacific and sinkables mostly preceding me toward the bottom. I’d have been disturbed as well as surprised to hear anything solid bump against my particular bit of wreckage. The silence was good news, but it still made me uncomfortable.

I’d been in space once — a waste investigation at one of the Board’s fusion research stations — and there was the same complete lack of sound. I hadn’t liked it then; it gave me the impression that the universe was deliberately snubbing me until the time would come to sweep up my remains. I didn’t like it now, though the feeling was different — this time it was as though someone were watching carefully to see what I was up to and was trying to make up his mind when to do something about it. A psychiatrist wouldn’t have been much help with that notion, of course, because there was a good chance that it was true.

Bert Whelstrahl had disappeared in this volume of water a year before. Joey Elfven, as competent an engineer and submariner as could be found on Earth, had been lost track of ten months later in the same neighborhood. They were both friends of mine, and I was bothered by their vanishing.

Six weeks ago, Marie Wladetzki had followed the other two. This was much worse from my point of view. She was not an investigator, of course — the Board, as personified by its present boss whose name I’ll leave out of this account, doesn’t believe women are objective enough — but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be curious.