"The Hydronauts"

THE HYDRONAUTS

by Carl L. Biemiller

Published by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York.

Part One

The Kelp Forest

The range was not the entire world. But it was more than 80 percent of it, and all water. The nuclear war had long since melted much of the polar ice caps. Whole sections of continents were long gone. The range was life. It supplied many of the raw materials of civilization for the hive cities. Those cities lay burrowed deep in North and South America, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Australia. Where England had been was part of the open range. And the range was a global warehouse, which also stored man’s equipment for survival.

Kim Rockwell, Marine Warden Third Class, was working a small portion of it, and that was not pleasant at the moment. But it was better than being in the cities. He was lucky to be in the sea at all. And even the brightest of Wardens III do not get fancy range jobs. Not when they are seventeen. He could take some pride in himself, however. The International Marine Council screened only the best of the youth candidates chosen by the Career Boards for Underwater Cadet and Warden Training.

He had worked hard ever since he left the Municipal Nursery where all children were graded for future places in the society. He had studied the science of the sea eight hours a day for more than ten years. And he even had studied at night when the hypnosleep machines turned his dreams into classrooms to add more knowledge.

Kim was aware that he would never live long enough to know enough, which is remarkable enough for seventeen.

The seas had also changed in the two centuries since the man-made suns seared earth with radioactive death. The old knowledge of oceans and ocean life was still on the library shelves, the microfilms, and the tape records buried before the war. But the life forms within the depths, even the character of some waters themselves, had altered during the trial of heat and radiation. Winds, waves, and currents were different than those recorded in the past. And there were Wardens of Commander Grade who argued that the rotation of the earth, and maybe its orbit around the sun too, had altered.

Kim was cruising the kelp forest. It was spooky today. The sky, some one hundred and fifty feet above at the sea surface, was overcast and dull gray. But even on the brightest days the forest was dark and moody, its light dimmed by the giant, floating fronds of the huge algae and the thicket-like stipes of stems of the ancient crop. The water was full of bouncing spores. They pinged off his itchy gill suit.

The silco-membrane suit was not only skintight. It was quite literally skin, with an inner lining of pore-penetrating follicles of hairs. They reached beneath Kim’s own tawny hide to his blood stream to supply him with oxygen directly from the water and to remove the carbon dioxide from his system at the same time. Kim’s lungs were working on exercise alone. He was breathing like a fish. But the gill suit itched. The darkness and the hailstorm of spores annoyed him.

He kicked his swim fins and glided, trying to decide whether the gathering darkness made the light from the equipment pack on his chest necessary. That keel-shaped pack held so much junk he almost hated to open it--working tools, communications devices, lunch pellets, a small drug-gun powerful enough to paralyze the motor muscles and nerves of all but the largest of the sea predators likely to appear in the forest.

There had been a forest of kelp, giant algae, along the southern California coast of North America for centuries. Men had harvested it since the nineteenth century, mostly for food and drugs. But in the generations since the nuclear war, the changed sea had altered the forest. Its plants grew to weird immensities with stipes, or stems, as thick as ancient earth tree trunks and with fronds and leaves as large as great floating tents.

Men still harvested the kelp for the substance called algin, which made a glue-like jelly that both preserved food shipped from the sea and made containers for it which, like rubbery missiles, could be shot through the compressed air, food-freight tubes to the cities inland. More important, men mined the forest.

The great plants absorbed vast amounts of minerals through their fronds: cobalt, iron, nickel, lead, tin, and zinc. The minerals obtained after processing were reasonably pure too. They were not like the crazy, unstable, radioactive isotopes from the mines of land. And they were vital to man.

It was Kim’s job and the work of many other wardens to make the kelp flourish, to record its progress, to aid in its harvest. He worked by day as the plants did, using their chlorophyll and sunlight energy to grow and to store their minerals.

At night he slept in a pressurized silicate bubble anchored eighty feet down on the bottom. He breathed compressed air from the bubble’s own units or fresh air valved in from a snorkel tube fastened to a tank buoy, which also marked the bubble’s location on the sea surface. It was home, where he could peel off the gill suit and rub algin lotion on his skin to remove the day’s tickles. The bubble was hot shower baths, hot meals, and a bed. It was an office where sonar devices pinged and radar and TV spied on his sector of the forest. It was a toy laboratory, a place where temperature charts were kept, salinity and sea chemical tests recorded. It was his house three months out of four. The fourth was a leave month, usually spent in the onshore headquarters compound miles south in Baja California.

He shared the bubble with his patrol buddy, co-custodian of Sector 12, Forest Area 80, the five square miles of their joint responsibility.

Her name was Toby Lee. She was a year older than Kim, but he ranked her by one month in the same grade, Warden Third Class. He had the uneasy feeling that she knew more about the work than he did, however. She came from a long line of fishery and sea-farm experts. She was Japanese. If the history books were right, the nation of her ancestors, now only a single tiny island, had been taking 90 percent of it proteins from the sea for a thousand years. She was a hard worker. She was a fun person. And she was doll high with a face like a flower and an all-girl form.

Not that that mattered. The International Marine Council was resolute in the manner in which it conditioned members of the Warden Service for life in the sea. Toby’s shape was merely feminine.

Right now it was missing, and the forest gloom was deepening.

By normal routine she shouldn’t be too far away, but it was easy enough to remain unseen in the kelp lanes. More sea life than man ever knew about had hidden the beds or taken refuge from predators there from time immemorial. And she might be doing a hundred things that evening like taking core samples from the stipes for mineral content analysis.

Kim picked up the warbler snapped to the top of his chest pack and spoke into it. The sound waves pulsed far and fast through the water.

“Toby. Come in, Toby. Time to knock off, time to swim home.”

The receiving units on the rim of his goggle mask trilled faintly.

“Whose home?” they chattered in soprano sonics.

Twelve feet of bottlenose tursiops, a dolphin weighing half a ton, slipped between kelp stipes and grinned at him.

“If there’s anything I hate it’s a big joker,” said Kim through the warbler. “I’m worried, Pudge. I can’t raise Toby. She ought to be working within a few hundred yards of here at this time of day. We’re not far from the bubble. Want to take a look for me?”

The sleek mammal slipped out of sight with one surge of fluked tail. The sound in Kim’s mask receivers whined up the auditory range beyond his hearing as the dolphin beamed on its own echolocation mechanism.

For the millionth time as he swam in its general wake, Kim appreciated the aquatic miracle that was the dolphin and the intelligence long inherent in its brain capacity—always physically larger than man’s. Communication with it, perfected originally with sonic codes, had evolved through years of in-sea teamwork into something near direct mental contact, a direct exchange of thoughts.

The pelagic, “open sea range” herds, which supplied meat and leather to the burrow cities of the wasted continents, could not be handled without dolphin help. The bay-area food shark complexes, even estuarial sea farms, could not be efficient without their assistance. Without their affection and friendship, the sub-sea continental shelves and deep slopes, even the sea surfaces, would destroy men with loneliness, if not with other perils.

Pudge and an equally sizable female named Peggy worked this sector with Kim and Toby, although they were on call from many duties when needed anywhere. Mostly they spent their time urging grazing fishes through the sound barrier lanes resonated through the forest. They chased kelp perches, foot-long anchovies, and overgrown sardines south so they didn’t have time to chew the mineral-laden fronds into shreds. They carried special equipment and messages from the camp bubbles between the sectors of forest, which stretched some two hundred miles along the coast. They were watchdogs as well as guardians against many marauders, sharks, giant squids and rays. They were invaluable detectors of changes in the sea, which sometimes escaped the sensing equipment of man.

But where was Toby?

Kim’s receivers vibrated.

“Trouble,” reported Pudge. “Found her but she’s unconscious. Am taking her to bubble. Meet us there. Don’t try to join us here. Poison water!”

Kim picked up a darker thought from the dolphin.

He swam, every muscle in his young athlete’s body straining as alarm gave him extra strength. He wished he had taken one of the water ejection just sleds on patrol that morning. He steadied his thinking.

“Can you give me an idea of her condition? He warbled. “Any apparent suit rips or wounds?” Already warden discipline and warden training had freed his mind for emergency action.

“Think drowned,” was the answer. “Water this area stained odd brown similar to blood. No suit rips. No wounds.”

In Kim’s mind there was a clear, if fleeting, picture of this patient cetacean, his gentle teeth holding Toby’s underarm and shoulder firmly, moving swiftly toward the bubble with Toby’s slim body streamed to the dolphin’s dark sides. His mind grew cold and busy.

“How’s your own air?” he piped. Then, before the answer, he said, “Leave her at the bubble. When you surface to blow see if the stain goes all the way to the surface and check the wave action up there, the wind too.”

Without losing a stroke he reached into his chest pack for the compact, fist-sized communicator and began his report to base. It was a report that would be picked up and recorded by every picket bubble in the forest as well as the headquarters compound in Baja. If one would advance in the Service, every sea condition, every emergency, anything both usual and unusual, were ultimately transmitted to base, some things merely faster than others. Kim wanted to advance. He had been taught that way.

He had not been taught to block out the sickening, frightening thought that Toby might not be alive, not alive, not alive this moment.

He found her half lifted into the open water hatch leading into the bottom level of the bubble where Pudge had placed her. In one swoop he was over her, hoisting her into breathable air on the grilled deck below the living area. He stripped the gill suit from her quickly and lifted her gently through the hatch to the main bubble floor.

Her honey-colored body was cold and faintly tinged with a purple cast. She was not breathing. He found a medical blanket, set it to full heat, and wrapped her slight form within it. Without taking time to remove his own gill suit, he threw his mask off, gulped deeply and began mouth-to-mouth, artificial respiration, not yet wishing to use the high oxygen drug injection directly into the blood stream until the lungs were partially active. He worked patiently, remembering all the instructors who said, “There is either all the time you need or never enough, and no limit on either.”

He remembered other tips. “Make sure you lift the chest cavity. Check for water in the lungs. It is carbon dioxide in the blood which causes the brain to tell the body to breathe.” Little scraps of thought jumbled in his head.

He worked steadily, patiently, with a paced rhythm as the minutes passed.

Others too worked. Back at Baja, headquarters wardens passed quiet orders along the bubble network. Men from the next nearest Forest Area in Sector 12 took tool-laden water jet sleds and left their patrol range for Kim’s. A picket hovercraft, riding herd on the whale range some fifty miles east of the kelp belt, streaked off post, picked up a doctor from a mother ship, and whizzed for Kim’s marker buoy.

Commander Tod Torrance spoke quietly to his assistant at Baja. “Is this Rockwell youngster steady?” he asked.

“Good cadet record,” replied his co-worker. “But this is his first solo emergency outside of two brushes with sharks. And you’ll notice his report was detailed even if he must have been in a tearing hurry to reach Lee. I don’t like that stained water. It must be taking dissolved oxygen out of the sea at a big rate. If it caught and suffocated Lee without much warning, it could destroy a lot of kelp too. Want to raise Rockwell directly?”

Commander Torrance was a spare man with some thirty years in the Service. It had been a long time since he had personally served on in-sea duty, but he remembered every single thing he had ever learned beneath the surface. He rubbed a hand over his gray head thoughtfully.

“He’ll be working on Lee,” he said. “And he’ll be beginning to have big doubts. Raise him by voice, but don’t ask for a report, just encourage him. I’m wondering if Lee didn’t get a big intake of some toxic, a direct poison instead of the drowning process that Rockwell is treating. But call now.”

Assistant Commander Jiggs Jensen, nearly as long in the Service as Torrance, nodded gravely. He was a big man, but his voice was surprisingly gentle as it drifted into Kim’s bubble from the instrument console speakers.

“Don’t bother answering,” it said. “There is a doctor on the way for Toby Lee and two men from Area 81 to help. Don’t give up on Lee. And don’t think about water condition in your sector. You’re doing fine. Over for now.”

The two veteran wardens looked at each other. On in-sea duty, men needed what support they could get. Their glances mirrored surprise and sudden alertness. The speaker in the Baja office went into action. The voice coming from it was strained but firm.

“Sir, I have given up on Lee as a drowned person. I have been thinking of water condition. Five minutes ago I treated Lee for poison. I think she may have taken it into her blood stream through the gill suit, and that it came from toxic plankton. I gave her adrenalin from the first-aid supplies. I injected it into the nearest artery to her heart that I could find. I hope it was the right decision….”

Kim’s voice from the bubble faltered. It shook a little.

Commander Torrance reached for the speaking unit and spoke calmly. “Good boy, Rockwell,” he said. “The doctor should be with you any minute. The decision seems correct. I suggest you keep up the chest massage. I further suggest that you place Toby Lee on a bunk bed and tie her there as firmly as possible. Repeat. Tie her into the bunk. She may regain consciousness violently. Repeat. Tie her. If your judgment is sound, she could shake herself into heart failure. Report as you will.”

“Well, we know he thinks and has courage enough to act,” said Assistant Commander Jensen. “I’ll raise that picket hovercraft and alert the doctor. It might save him some time.”

Kim never knew just when he had begun to concentrate on the fact that Toby’s trouble might not be caused by a lack of oxygen, that the dolphin’s thought about drowning might not be right. He knew that Toby was not responding to artificial respiration. And she should have been. He didn’t know how long he had been working on her when the thought of poison--as poison, that is--passed through his mind. Had he wasted too much time? Too much precious time?

Poison water, the dolphin had reported. The intelligent mammal was never wrong about changes in the sea. But what kind of poison? What kind of natural taint in this section of the Pacific coastline? He kept right on working, forcing air into Toby’s lungs, but he searched his mind back through old lessons, old studies, as he worked.

The sea was full of life forms, many that could only be detected and studied through a microscope. They were the drifters called plankters. They were plant planktons and animal planktons. They were food for other tiny forms of life. Indeed, some of them were food for the largest animals and fishes in the sea, some types of whales for instance. Among them, these primitive organisms too small to see with the naked eye, these things called phytoplanktons, were certain forms called dinoflagellates. These microscopic organisms had characteristics of both plants and animals.

They had another characteristic too, Kim remembered suddenly. Sometimes they multiplied. They flowered and turned poisonous. The flowering, according to the old books, caused “red tides.” Then marine creatures, tidewater fish, crabs, mussels, rays, eels, and others died by the millions.

Pudge had reported that the sea around Toby was stained brown, like old blood. Could Toby have taken in dinoflagellates poison through the gill suit? If so, it would have blocked her heart action, frozen her muscle action.

He made his decision. He acted upon it. He left Toby and stumbled to the well-stocked medical kit, half wondering why he still had swim fins on his feet. He found the hypo needle, sought among the carefully labeled stimulants for the ampoule marked adrenalin. He fixed the hypo and made the injection. His fingers trembled slightly on Toby’s satin skin, warm from the blanket. They were still trembling when Assistant Commander Jensen’s voice reached into the bubble. He felt very old, very tired. But he made his report as soon as the comfort of Jensen’s message settled about him. And he snapped to a wary attention at Commander Torrance’s instructions.

Kim left Toby in the blanket as he placed her on her bunk. He bound her firmly with two sections of filament fronds for study. He settled beside her on his knees, and awkwardly but effectively, he applied pressure and release to her rib cage.

He knew about in-sea dangers. Long instruction, long training had given him a built-in awareness of the death that lives in many forms in the sea range. This, if it came to Toby, was his own death too, as she had become part of his daily being. He waited and grew up beside her as young soldiers once grew up in combat during all of man’s wars but the last one.

Then her chest fluttered. He could feel her tremble. He bent his mouth to hers and began again the respiratory process. He felt her shake as though something inside her was trying to get out. Her eyes opened and looked through him into nothing. They saw him and knew him.

The communications console spoke.

“This is Doctor Felipe Baguio. We’re right above you. Sea is calm. Wind no force at all. We’re lowering a pressure capsule to your bottom hatch. The dolphin is steadying the cable to you. I’m coming down on a weighted dive. Give me a reading on your bubble pressure so I can stabilize the capsule for the patient.”

Kim gave him the figures automatically.

“It’s dark up here so I’ll be a few minutes,” said Dr. Baguio. Kim had not noticed the cold light come on from the silicate bubble walls as it did automatically each day when the surface above met nightfall. The people from Area 81 must be coming in on laser light units to cut the muck outside.

There was color flooding Toby’s face, and her lips were moving. His feeling moved up in his throat and choked him, and he swallowed.

There was noise from the sea hatch deck below. He left Toby and looked down. The doctor, his wet suit dripping, was slipping out of a small tank harness and dropping a weight belt, which fell with a chunk.

He was a small, wiry man with a pug-nosed, bland, brown face. Even motionless for the moment, he looked very busy. “I heard from Base on the way,” he said. “Let’s see the patient. Capsule is down. You’ve got other visitors too. A couple of men attaching sleds, and a nosy dolphin who sends his regards. Come on now.”

Dr. Baguio was deft and sure as he examined Toby Lee. He talked to himself as much as he talked to Kim. “Toxic all right. Poison right to the entire motor system. Some kind of an alkaloid with a nitrogen base. There’s an antidote for something like this in your kit made right from your garden of kelp. But how would you know? Stimulant was right too, but there’s a better one in the kit too. How would you know? She’s a hospital job. Have to watch for brain damage.”

He straightened and looked directly into Kim’s miserable eyes.

“You did fine, son,” he said.

“Will she be all right?” asked Kim.

“Think so now. Don’t really know. As soon as I do, you’ll know.”

With the two men from Area 81 helping, they placed a drowsing Toby into the capsule and sealed her there. The capsule was really a self-contained depth-metal pod. It maintained its own inner pressure set at whatever depths from which its occupant had been rescued. It supplied its own oxygen mixes, its own heat. It could be set to provide massage for circulation, even give anti-pain or food injections. Although such capsules were usually lowered by cable for exact position placement, they had their own buoyancy attachments and could pop directly to the surface for immediate pickup. This one would attach to the flat hull of the picket hovercraft and be zoomed to the base hospital at Baja within minutes.

“So long,” said the little doctor cheerfully. “Glad there wasn’t anything messy down here like shark attack. Made your own report to headquarters, Rockwell. I’ll make mine on the way. Suggest you use shield suits and air tanks if you’re going to work bad water. Gill suits would put the stuff right into your blood stream. I’m off.”

He slipped into his gear, pushed through the lower hatch and vanished.

A big part of Kim had already gone before the doctor with Toby. But the first duty of the Service is the Service. He turned to face the wardens from Area 81 who were watching him. They introduced themselves. Although their names were familiar to Kim, their persons were not, only their voices. Changing shifts, different duty hours, varied leave times did not make for many close acquaintances within Forest Sectors. But the bond of common work, shared danger, and the dependence of each upon another made them closer than the families in the old history books once were.

Tuktu Barnes was wide and stocky with a deep chest and a vast spread of shoulder muscles. His face was flat and looked flatter as he grinned in a huge smile. He came from the North, from the McKinley City deep within the Alaskan mountain ranges, and had taken his training there. He had served a brief apprenticeship in the Bering Sea before his transfer to the Kelp Forest. Many generations ago Tuktu’s ancestors had been Eskimos. He was a specialist, or going to be, in nutrients, the foods of the plants, mammals and fishes, the foods of mollusks. He would someday help man enrich the many desert areas of the range—as an old-time farmer used fertilizers—to support useful life, which would, in turn, support the cities.

Genright Selsor, who was Tuktu’s patrol buddy, was slender and somehow angular. He was relaxed, genial, and black as the night within the abysses of the sea. He had been schooled in the great burrow city that lay safe and busy under the plateau of ancient Ethiopia. He too had served a short apprenticeship in-sea off the coast of south-west Africa before transfer. The Service did move its people, as it would move Kim. Selsor hoped, someday, to be one of the great oceanographic chemists.

Both Tuktu and Genright were Wardens III. Each ranked Kim by nearly a year. Each was older. Tuktu was eighteen, Genright nineteen. As members of ancient armies once did, each had made a point of rank with their introductions.

Kim was not impressed. The accident to Toby, whether he knew it or not, had already given him a new firmness. And this was his area, Area 80, not 81. He was careful in his conduct, however.

“I’ve got to report to Base,” he said. “I’m responsible here, responsible for the whole area with Lee gone, unless otherwise instructed. Here’s what I now know….”

He told them of the dolphin’s finding of poison water. He gave details of Toby’s condition and his action. He filled them in on the doctor’s opinion, added his own ideas about dinoflagellates. He told them of the doctor’s report of surface calm and lack of surface winds.

“Anything either of you can add from your own trip from your bubble to this one?”

Tuktu spoke. “We came fast and more prepared to give you physical help if you and Lee needed it than anything else. Base had told us about the poison water, so we came in shield suits, using tanks with all the junk we could find on the sleds.”

Genright interrupted. “I don’t think we came through the danger area. We might not have noticed anyhow. It was dark and visibility in the whole forest isn’t too good under the best of conditions. I did notice a definite set of current, which bends toward the coast. It may be moving the tainted water east and north from here if there is no wind and wave action at work. I think Tuktu might agree also that we didn’t notice any water disturbance, any turbulence. One other thing, I think we crossed one of your fish lanes. We picked up some slow traffic moving south in our laser light tubes, but no dead fish.”

“But if that stuff is robbing plants of oxygen, we could lose a lot of kelp,” mused Tuktu. “Anyhow,” he added, “I’m not about to go out and roam until we can see.”

“Think there’s any chance that there could be any gunk in the poison zone which would show?” asked Kim thoughtfully.

“It’s your house,” said Tuktu.

Kim nodded. He moved to the instrument console, adjusted the radar controls and began a 360-degree sweep. His visitors peeked at the screen with him. Kelp stipes. Moving blips in the north-south fish lanes. A boat-sized blip near the surface.

“Oh, boy,” said Tuktu.

“Shark, probably a big blue,” murmured Genright.

A smudge, but bright, trailing light on the screen.

“Squid,” said Kim, “big one, and dragging three-quarters of himself behind him. They come for tons out of Monterrey Bay once in a while, and they can eat twelve hundred pounds of marlin for a snack.”

There were two blips, fair sized, almost motionless directly above the bubble and only about three feet from the surface of the sea.

“I know them,” drawled Genright. “Pudge and Peggy. Some work. Others sleep. But they sure are good to Tuktu and me.”

Kim made a slight control change. There was a straight line of light, broken with an indentation, and in front of it, fanning into the darkness, was a pale blur, a phantom of cloud.

“That’s shoreline,” he said, “and something coming from it into the sea which fades away. Take a good look, Selsor. You want to be a chemist. Is that a chemical cloud or a physical one?”

“Whatever it is, it’s an active radar wave conductor,” said Genright.

“Of course,” snapped Kim, “of course…”

He snapped open the communicator to Baja headquarters, using the bubble network channel so the whole forest could hear. “Rockwell reporting to Base,” he said, “as ordered.”

“And somewhat later than expected,” muttered Assistant Commander Jensen to Commander Torrance, both still on duty. “All right, Rockwell, let’s hear it,” he said firmly.

Kim took a deep breath. “You will have had the doctor’s report, sir,” he said.

“Too true,” mouthed Jensen.

“Barnes and Selsor are with me. I am not taking them out until first light.”

“Something else we know about Rockwell,” murmured Jensen, “they outrank him, but he’s taken over on his own base.”

“They did not encounter bad water to the best of their knowledge in route. They report firm current set which, in the absence of wave and wind action, suggests to them that poison may be moving north and east. I agree from my personal knowledge of the area.”

“Do you now,” said Commander Torrance softly.

“Suggest, sir, that all forest bubbles make a scan of the coastline at intersect Coordinates Forty and One-eighty South, and if base thinks justified that some over flight be made in the area. The scope here picked up sort of a cloud showing, sir. It might indicate something flowing from land to sea, which might have changed the water elements, maybe causing a poison area. This is only an idea, sir.”

Kim paused. “Has there been any overland rain in that region?”

At Baja, Commander Torrance looked at Jensen, then spoke into the communicator. “That’s desert, Rockwell. It has been for a hundred years. What are you suggesting? Some rainwater runoff carrying radioactivity from an old war pocket that would affect plankton?”

“Yes sir,” said Kim simply.

“We’ll check,” said the commander. “Meanwhile, all bubbles make scan and report. Rockwell, Barnes, and Selsor, we’ll get additional men into your present area as needed. But I expect a complete check from you as soon as possible. You’ll be glad to know that Lee is responding to care. One more thing, have you checked all water temperature reading stations on the master bubble chart of your area?”

“Oh, golly, sir,” said Kim.

“Out,” said Baja Base to the network.

“One other thing we know about Rockwell,” said the commander to his assistant. “He gets ideas and isn’t afraid to state them. He also goofs, but he doesn’t apologize about it.”

Commander Torrance was wrong. Back in Bubble 80 Kim grimaced at Tuktu and Genright. “How dumb can I get? I was even to dumb to say I was sorry.”

We agree,” said Tuktu. “You almost had us thinking you were bright. If I don’t catch some sleep, I’ll be dumber than you are.”

Kim grinned. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll give them the readings, as if they didn’t already have them back at base. Sack out. I’ll be right behind you.”

There was only one light in the forest in the morning. It was comprised of different degrees of shadow. It was almost always dark under the canopy of kelp fronds, which hid millions of the smaller fish from the greater ones, which preyed upon them. Sometimes there seemed to be more light near the bottom where moray eels, rockfishes, brittle stars, abalones, and lobsters watched an endless parade of life from their own hidey-holes. Even the huge holdfasts, root structures, of the kelp stipes teemed with life, most of them microscopic in size, some of them dangerous to the valuable kelp crop.

Kim noticed that the sea urchins were getting out of hand again despite constant efforts to get rid of them. Urchins, those walking pincushions of living spines, ate the key, or primary, stipe of a plant leaving it to float free and die.

He thought about bringing the sea otter packs back for a week or so. The sea otters, tame and joyful beasts whose gleaming pelts once caused wars in long-past centuries, loved urchins. They loved them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The otter herdsmen moved them about the forest from time to time to grow fat while controlling pests.

The forest was a jungle all right. It was a nursery and a slaughterhouse, too, where wandering giants of the sea often cruised seeking easy food.

It felt restless that morning. He didn’t know about Tuktu or Genright, but Kim felt a vast unease, an itch of trouble. For no definite reason, he felt wary, extra alert.

They had not yet found tainted water although the dolphins were making wide-ranging casts. And they too were moving with some speed using sleds, stopping only to take water samples and to examine darker sections of the forest for dead fish. They checked the clusters of tiny life forms, which attached themselves to kelp fronds and filtered their food from the water. They would die first from poison.

There was normal movement in the fish lanes, the traffic of grazing fish, which had to be kept from the kelp as much as possible, and bigger fish pursuing the grazers. All of them, however, were impelled by their own sensory urges through the lanes.

The lanes were two parallel lines of small nuclear power packs spaced at intervals some three hundred feet apart. The distance between the lines was about one hundred yards, the “highway” down which the fish swam. The packs emitted sound waves geared to an unpleasant frequency which formed, in a sense, a barrier on either side of the “highway.” Since everything in the sea is, in some measure, sensitive to sonic impulses which guide much of fish movement, the fish stayed in the “middle of the street.” They moved rapidly when chased either by the dolphins or other creatures seeking snacks. The packs served another purpose. They could be controlled also to produce heat, which caused thermal, or heat currents to rise from the sea floor. Thus the rich food, or nutrients, in the sediments of the bottom rose to feed plankton, which, in turn, fed the fish, which ate plankton.

Plankton eaters like herring, sardines and anchovies, swimming down the “highway,” literally swam in a never-ending chain of roadside restaurants.

“I think we ought to check in with base,” suggested Kim through the warbler. “Anybody think otherwise?”

“Are we almost out of your area?” asked Tuktu.

“Nearly,” answered Kim. “Genright, you’re the chemist, do you think the stuff’s dispersed or diluted so much we can’t find it? Or what’s your guess about current moving it out to sea away from the forest?”

“Could be either,” warbled Genright. “Might also be that if it were flagellates carrying the stuff that they too died of it, and whatever it was is now part of some sediment on the bottom somewhere.”

“But if Kim’s guess that the infection was coming from land was right, there ought to be more bad water moving our way,” said Tuktu.

“Unless base somehow stopped the flow,” added Genright.

“Or unless it was just one bad, hot pocket that got flushed out by rain back on the land, and that was the end of it,” warbled Kim. I’m going to call in the dolphins before I report.” He felt somehow sick to think that Toby might have been trapped in just a freak patch of ocean and nearly died. He had another thought, a strange one. Could people still die in a war two hundred years old? Of course they could. The earth was sick. Otherwise the cities would not hide so deep within it.

Pudge and Peggy arrived in a boil of water from their own speed. Pudge wore a crown of kelp stipes that he had torn off in passage. He looked like a grin wearing a wig, and he nuzzled and bumped Kim into a slow somersault, almost shifting the compact tank from his shield suit. He was glad to see him. He always was. He didn’t need code or trills to say so. Kim could feel the cetacean’s thought, and he sensed that Tuktu could also. Tuktu might have told him that a couple of million years’ worth of Eskimos had talked to fish, whales, seals, foxes, and a lot of other wild things as well.

If Pudge looked silly, Peggy was ridiculous. She was a bigger creature than the male dolphin, maybe fifteen feet in length and thicker through the girth. She had slammed through something that left a dab of phosphorescent slime on her dorsal fin and around her mouth. Her grin was green and it glowed. Her dorsal fin looked like some strange plant growing from her spine. She too nuzzled Kim and spun him into a slow turn.

“Report, report, you lumps,” snapped Kim. “Did you find bad water? Did you see dead fish? What about the sea?”

The dolphins had ranged far, into and past the areas adjacent to Kim’s own. The surface sea was quiet, winds gentle. There was no bad water that they had found. There were no dead fish except some they had eaten. A killer whale of great size had skirted the seaside of the forest, swimming fast to the south. They had given it room and hidden even if the killer whale was their own first cousin. There were boats in the sky headed for the area. That was all. Yet, added Pudge, to him the entire range along the coast seemed alert and waiting for something.

“Let’s check in to base,” said Genright.

Kim snapped on the communicator. “Rockwell here, and Barnes and Selsor, Area 80 Patrol…”

“Come in, Rockwell, we’ve been expecting you. This is Lieutenant Rang.”

“We have found no poison water, sir,” said Kim. “Dolphins have covered two areas beyond us to the north and indicate no altered sea. Forest seems normal, sir. But dolphins reported surface craft approaching this vicinity.”

He paused. One did not ask questions in the Service. The lieutenant would tell him what he saw fit to tell him.

Genright asked the lieutenant for him.

“Any findings at base, sir, about cause of tainted water?”

Their receivers chuckled.

“Rockwell,” said the lieutenant from Baja, “Commander Torrance asked me to tell you that the weather people claim not a drop of rain has fallen at Coordinates Forty and One-eighty South for fifty years.”

An edge of silence sliced off conversation. The lieutenant continued. “He and an investigation crew were into the coast early, however. He asked me to tell you that it is better to be lucky than right. They found remains of an old atomic desalinization plant from the days when they first made fresh water from salt. The walls, which held the old coolant system for the pile, had burst from age. What liquid was left ran off over a hard-baked surface into the sea. There wasn’t too much of it apparently, but it poisoned a small area of the sea with radioactive plankton. The commander thought dinoflagellates too. He commended you.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Kim.

“Don’t interrupt, Warden Three. The dolphin report of craft in your vicinity is correct. It is early in the season, but rather than risk the slightest danger to the kelp, the commander has ordered harvest crews to cut crop. Barnes and Selsor will return with you to bubble where you will all stand by to assist at Harvest Master’s orders. That is all for now.”

“Well,” warbled Tuktu, “we’d have had to come over and help cut hay anyhow.”

They pointed the sleds for Bubble 80, moved through the patrol alleys in the gently waving, swaying, dancing stipes.

As they towed behind the jet sleds, Kim wondered about his edginess. The forest still didn’t feel right. Was it because there might still be a patch of poison water wandering among the kelp?

He had heard old instructors talk about “sea feel” and how the best of wardens seemed to have it as an extra instinct. He was too new in the Service to talk about such matters, but yet he knew that the way one grew wise in the sea was to use every sense possible, even at the risk of seeming foolish to others.

He thought about the harvest craft above. They were flat barge-like boats equipped to travel as hovercraft or to float on the sea surface. Booms extended from their sides to tow-cutting vanes, set for varying depths, which pruned through the dark algae like old-fashioned lawn mowers or grain harvesters used on land farms before the world went underground. Sometimes the cables of the cutting banes tangled in heavy kelp, and then the wardens worked to free them. And that was hard, awkward work.

When the harvest floated free, the cutting vanes were stowed away, and great grabs of what looked like woven metal baskets were lowered from the booms to pluck the kelp from the surface and jump it into the barges on its first step to the processing factories.

A mother ship accompanied the harvest fleet as a dormitory for the harvest crews, a communications center, and an emergency hospital. The mother ship monitored the entire area during operations as did the headquarters base at Baja.

If things went right, several sections of the forest could be cut and loaded upon the barges in a few days.

But occasionally things did not go right. Nobody was ever sure, despite the constant patrols from the area bubbles on the sea bottom, just what the harvesting might stir from the kelp or what sort of creatures the activity might attract to the area.

Kim realized this. So did Tuktu and Genright.

“Let’s move a bit nearer bottom,” suggested Kim. “Might make a little better time. These shield suits and tanks slow us some despite the sleds. And I think we could use some lights. Okay?”

“Good idea,” warbled Genright.

“Maybe,” added Tuktu, “but swimming is easier than chopping grass, and you know what they’ll want us for when we get back.”

Kim hesitated. “This may sound silly,” he said, “but it will only take a second. I want something a bit bigger than a hand light. Let me get the laser from the sled, and I just may grab a drug-gun too.”

“Jumpy?” asked Genright.

“Some,” said Kim evenly.

“Me too,” said Tuktu suddenly.

They rummaged with equipment clips on the sleds, and went on, spraying radiance through the lanes. Some sizable abalones swam by ejecting water from their shells, which they clapped like hands for motion. The sudden light had them looking for darkness. Green and red sea anemones, more like bloated flowers than living creatures, flexed nervously on the bottom.

Tuktu saw it first. His warbler squeaked. Kim automatically set his communicator to full send and receive.

Genright named it.

“Giant squid!”

A single press of a stud on the rod-like laser light he carried made it both a light and a tight-beam heat ray capable of boring a hole through rock.

Even as he pressed it, Kim automatically recalled what he knew about the monster looming ahead. The cephalopods, the class of mollusks, including squids, octopuses, and cuttlefishes. Meat eaters, and lightning fast in the water. Destroyers of man, fish, able to do battle with whales. Even before the war there were species sixty feet long, two tentacles, eight arms, monstrous mouths, huge eyes of perfect vision. Even hundreds of years before the war, there were myths of the kraken, the squid which demolished whole fishing boats.

“Tuktu! Genright! Split!” he commanded. “Separate!” He spoke into his communicator. “Giant squid,” he reported. “Suggest any surface craft lift from water.”

There was a hiss and a boil of tiny bubbles as Kim’s laser beam lanced ahead into what seemed a wall of great grasping arms and tentacles.

Tuktu’s sled peeled off to the right, banging against kelp stipes. Genright’s turned left down a fish lane. Kim angled his toward the surface in and effort to rise above the monster.

He heard Tuktu’s voice burble like flute music.

“This thing’s forever,” it said. “It must be a hundred yards long!”

Kim kept his thumb on the firing stud as he angled upward, trying for the great squid’s eye. A coil of rubbery arm, round as a barrel, tipped his sled and sent it spinning away from him. He held hard to the laser and dived for the bottom. The arm drew the entire sled into a writhing nest of flesh. Kim swam desperately for one of the huge, igloo-like holdfasts which anchored the kelp plants.

From the corner of his eye he saw a blinding streak of light, then another. Tuktu and Genright, from somewhere down the length of the monster, were firing into the bulk.

There was a smother of bubbles and a heaving swell of water as if the ocean were suffering some internal storm. There was a brittle crackling. He could hear Tuktu again. Oddly enough, the voice sounded cool, almost amused.

“This thing’s tearing down more kelp than they’ll harvest.”

It was hard to see in the light-streaked water, but clearly the squid had turned direction. Kim fired again and again into the mass. Three-quarters of the creature were arms and tentacles. It would take luck to find head, eyes, and nerve centers.

There was a high-pitched warble, tilting off the edge of sound into a scream.

As Kim watched in horror, he saw a great curved arm come into view. It carried the limp body of Genright. Unconsciously, Kim noted that the young warden’s tank and mask seemed to be intact. But Genright’s body was rag flopping, inert. He swam directly into the tangle of deadly flesh.

“Tuktu!” he warbled without thinking. “It’s got Genright. I’m making a try for him.”

There was no answer.

Then there was, and with it new courage.

Boring through the kelp, swiftly and as directly as aimed missiles and just as relentless, came the dolphins. They homed on the great squid’s mantle, their jaws scissoring for the attack. Generations of the cetacean ancestors, particularly their cousins, the whales, had fed upon squid and had borne the scars of arms dappled with toothed suckers for their diet.

There was a single thud of impact. Pudge and Peggy struck simultaneously, driving their weight into the prey. There were tons in collision.

From the edge of his vision, Kim sensed other forms behind the dolphins. Dimly he knew that they must be divers coming from the harvest fleet of the surface with new help. And in the new light they brought with them, he saw Genright’s body float loose as the giant arm released it. He swam for it.

The world turned black. The massive struggle vanished.

The giant squid spewed froth tons of the inky, ebon fluid concealed within its body for use as a last, desperate escape cover. An acre of the kelp forest became night. Kim reached Genright. He found a grip on a tank strap attached to his shield suit and held on.

Something reached out of the darkness and struck a blow. Kim felt his head snap into his shoulders. And that was the last he felt. But the squid arm that had flicked from the inky cloud to deal that blow curled back upon itself. It slowly settled to the bottom.

There was talk along the bubble network. Back at the base at Baja, Commander Tod Torrance issued instructions. Some of them were reissued by the Harvest Master as the hovercraft fleet began its work in the canopy of the kelp forest. Long booms bristled from the sides of the mother ship, and great sections of giant squid were taken aboard. Some of its flesh would feed the cities. Laboratory workers would analyze other portions of its body, continuing research on the nerve structure begun by other technicians two centuries previous.

The voices were very far away, but Kim heard them.

“Concussed, wrenched back, sprained shoulder, one broken collar bone, and decompression now complete.”

He opened his eyes and looked at the little, brown-faced doctor he had last seen in his bubble with Toby Lee, Dr. Felipe Baguio, he remembered. But something was funny. The doctor had two faces. Tuktu was standing beside him. He had two faces as well. He remembered something else.

“Genright?” he asked through stiff lips.

“Regenerating room,” said Tuktu, “for a new arm.”

“You’re fine,” added the doctor. “We got you brought up in a hurry, and too fast for the capsule so you had to go back under pressure. That process is now complete. If you can’t move, don’t worry. I’ve got you in a stiff gelatin cast.”

Kim could almost feel his mind begin to work.

Genright and a new arm, he thought. There were many creatures in the sea with the power to grow new appendages for those lost in combat or by accident. Long study of those creatures over the years had made some of the process available to man. All sea hospitals kept spare parts in their body banks, arms, legs, and other vital organs. Regeneration was a fact, and almost always successful.

“Genright?” he asked again.

“So maybe he’ll have a white arm,” said Tuktu. “But thanks to you he’ll be around for a long time, all of him.”

He grinned. “You didn’t ask how I was,” he continued, “and Pudge and Peggy are busy below.”

Kim was very sleepy. He slept.

The sun was bright at Baja. It burned the bay waters white, and it turned the sea lemon. In Commander Torrance’s office on the spit of land between bay and sea, the light was muted by Polaroid windows. But it was ample to see the small smile lines in the commander’s face, and to see a companion pleasantry on the face of Assistant Commander Jiggs Jensen.

Kim, a new stripe on his short-sleeved uniform shirt and new creases in his dark green shorts, stood erect before them. He looked at the three people behind them. There were Tuktu, Genright, and, very proudly, Toby Lee with her knees shining beneath a trim skirt that looked as though it were woven from sargassum weed.

“Congratulations, Warden Second Class Rockwell,” said Commander Torrance. “As you know, it is customary to serve a certain time in one grade of rank before advancing into another. Your recent conduct in the kelp forest has shortened that time.

“I might add that it was not your response to the Toby Lee emergency or your analysis of poisoned water. Nor was it your obvious concern with your fellow workers in the case of Genright and the squid.

“This is a practical service. And that sort of conduct is expected. But your warning to the surface fleet about to begin the kelp harvest could have saved us considerable equipment. The state of the world being what it is, equipment is hard to come by….”

Assistant Commander Jiggs Jensen laughed.

“So, Warden Second Class Rockwell,” continued Commander Torrance, “congratulations. You are relieved of duty in the kelp and hereby assigned to a period of laboratory duty at Baja before reassignment to the beef shark herds in the inshore compounds of Jewel Bay, Baja. Dismissed.”

They sprawled on the beach together, Toby Lee, Tuktu, Genright, and Kim, two hours later.

“I don’t suppose anybody wants to go for a swim?” asked Tuktu.

“I never learned,” said Genright.

“Us neither,” shouted Toby and Kim as one.

“Well, Genright and I have one more month in the kelp before we get our stripes,” said Tuktu. “Now that you rank us, you’ll be awful to live with, Kim. But maybe we can catch an assignment in the shark compounds with you.”

“Maybe,” said Toby Lee. “Meanwhile he’ll be working in the laboratory with me where he belongs….”

“With you?” queried Genright.

“Or some other shark,” said Kim firmly.

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