"You all right, Carl?"
He had looked at me again. Or seemed to. Perhaps that mindless brutehad been waiting half a millennium to ruin the life of a member of the mosthighly developed species in business....
"You okay?"
...Or perhaps it had been ruined already, long before their encounter,and theirs was just a meeting of beasts, the stronger bumping the weakeraside, body to psyche....
"Carl, dammit! Say something!"
He broke again, this time nearer. Did you ever see the trunk of atornado? It seems like something alive, moving around in all that dark.Nothing has a right to be so big, so strong, and moving. It's a sickeningsensation.
"Please answer me."
He was gone and did not come back that day. I finally made a couple ofwisecracks at Mike, but I held my next cigarette in my right hand.
The next seventy or eighty thousand waves broke by with a monotonoussimilarity. The five days that held them were also without distinction. Themorning of the thirteenth day out, though, our luck began to rise. The bellsbroke our coffee-drenched lethargy into small pieces, and we dashed from thegallery without hearing what might have been Mike's finest punchline.
"Aft!" cried someone. "Five hundred meters!"
I stripped to my trunks and started buckling. My stuff is always withingrabbing distance.
I flipflopped across the deck, girding myself with a deflatedsquiggler.
"Five hundred meters, twenty fathoms!" boomed the speakers.
The big traps banged upward and the Slider grew to its full height,m'lady at the console. It rattled past me and took root ahead. Its one arm