"The Hydronauts"

THE HYDRONAUTS

by Carl L. Biemiller

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

Part Two

The Shark Pens

What was once Baja California before the nuclear war fractured the earth was now a chain of islands. None of them were more than a few miles in width, and most of them were desert supporting experimental groves of dwarf trees, some random miles of transplanted grasses, and blotchy patches of strange bushes bleached by salt and sun.

The sea surged over the islands when the big storms came. And even when it was most docile, the Pacific poured through many inlets into what the old maps in the libraries of the hive cities, burrowed deep in the inland earth, showed as the Gulf of California. There was always the tidal exchange of warm, inshore waters with the cold floods of the open ocean.

It was an exchange, which kept inshore water temperatures near 70 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale. It kept salinity readings stable and even currents predictable.

And as Kim Rockwell, Marine Warden Second Class, attached to the Headquarters Marine Base at Baja and the beef shark compounds, well knew, it was a controlled exchange. Each one of the many inlets dividing the chain of islands was a product of skilled hydraulic engineering. Some rationed the tides. Other served as supply funnels routing food fishes such as the mutated herrings, anchovies, and other migratory stocks from the open sea into the inner waters.

The ancient gulf had been renamed Jewel Bay. The name came from the areas of fused earth, which rimmed the shoreline of the vast estuary. These ceramic “beaches,” hard fired by fusion blasts, sparkled like jewels of many colors.

Kim watched the play of sunset light along the eastern rim of the great bay, a light so clear that the range of mountains nearly thirty miles away seemed almost within walking reach. He wore the classroom uniform, short-sleeved blouse and shorts, deep-depth green in color, and rope-soled sandals. There was a patient set at the corners of his mouth. It was a patience shaped by long discipline and a deserved, if quiet, pride. Not many young men were Wardens II at seventeen. True, the International Marine Council took only the best of the candidates selected by the hive city Career Boards for Underwater Cadet and Warden Training. And he had worked hard studying the old and new sciences for some ten years.

He was waiting for Toby Lee. He had left her in the Base Laboratory. She had been scanning sections of the tough cartilage that made up the backbone of a specimen beef shark under a tri-dimensional, computer-linked microscope. It was a method of determining age, growth, and eventual stock weight in the animals. She had wanted to finish up before joining him at one of the docks, which served the shark compounds.

He squinted at the great bay as he waited.

From its northernmost inlet, ranging south for more than two hundred miles to the shallow, land-locked flats of the estuarial farms, which supplied both food and drugs for the cities from many cultivated life forms, Jewel Bay was a monstrous aquarium.

And some seventy miles of its comparatively deep waters to the north were graze and holding pens for the beef sharks.

There were many such establishments throughout the world of oceans in all latitudes, and wherever they could be maintained.

In a world grown arid and chemically polluted long before the crushing ruin of atomic disaster, land areas fertile enough to grow even the meanest of food crops were few.

The seas meant survival.

Kim did not dwell on the thought. He watched the light-flecked waters. Beneath them, and en route back to base, were Tuktu Barnes and Genright Selsor, who were now also assigned to the shark pens.

Both were still Wardens III although due for advancement for service time in that grade. Tuktu didn’t care about rank. Kim thought it mattered to Genright, however. He sensed a change in Genright since that clash with the giant squid in the kelp forests. If it weren’t un-Service-like, he could think that Genright resented the fact that Kim had been credited with saving his life.

But, then again, maybe Genright wasn’t too happy in the shark pens. He had been moody and oddly strange since the first days of Baja duty.

The great, fanged selachians could be controlled and bred. Some species like the porbeagle variants, the herring sharks in the bay, could become domesticated in a wild sort of way. No shark could be made docile or harmless.

The mutated monsters of the open, pelagic range, the great whites which reached lengths of sixty to eighty feet, and the blues, the tigers, the makos, the hammerheads, threshers, lemons, and their assorted cousins could only be taken in open and bloody battle. Usually this demanded sophisticated equipment, and the help of dolphin packs trained to combat.

If Genright were nervous about sharks, let him be, just as long as it didn’t interfere with the work. Kim couldn’t say that he felt any affection for them. He felt an inside smile at his own nonsense. He certainly wasn’t about to go itchy-kitchy-coo or tickly-scratchy-scrutch at any of those ever-moving beasts, which never slept and never rested in the lifelong quest for food.

He remembered one of the first indoctrination lectures given by Base Commander Tod Torrance to the new wardens assigned to the pens.

“The life form we know as sharks goes back to the Devonian period, some two hundred and seventy to three hundred million years ago in earth’s history. It is one of the dawn vertebrates. It has adapted and endured, and in many cases with very little physical change. Man as Homo sapiens, appearing on earth only a bare million years ago, is an infant compared to the shark.

“Further, man has an inherited fear of sharks.”

Commander Tod Torrance was a slat-like man, wiry and lean, a prototype of physical economy. He had spent more than thirty years in the International Marine Service. When he grinned he lighted up a room.

“That comes from long years of being eaten by them, long years of worshiping them as gods, and only a comparatively few years of eating them back.”

We do more than eat them back, thought Kim. A portion of their meat goes back to the cities fresh for ration roasts. Hides go back for leathers and abrasives. Livers go back for precious oils and vitamins to ease the burden on the manufacturing laboratories. Fins go back to be boiled down for gelatin soups. Residues were made into powder fertilizers to strengthen the nutrients of the hydroponic farm parks and into protein fishmeals for diet additives. Trace chemicals were isolated for medical research, and insulin extracts taken from still other organs.

There was a brisk whisper of feet on the dock behind him.

“Hey, dreamer, here I am at last. Are Tuktu and Genright back yet?”

He turned and smiled. Toby always looked as fresh as something just unwrapped, and somehow larger than a girl who could stand under his outstretched arm.

“Thought you fell asleep. No, Miss Lee. They aren’t back, but maybe the herds were stampeding today.”

“I doubt it,” she said. “There’s enough food in the bay to keep the darlings in munchies without even moving for it. The lab charts showed a big school of something, maybe pilchard, pouring in through most of the north inlets all day.”

“Well, maybe, they’re doing range work. Some of those big water-filtering sponges that keep the plankters circulating in the South Cove needed relocating a few days ago. And the flat farms had some extra solid wastes from inland to be hauled into the big pens for water enrichment. They’ll be along. Look at the other docks.”

The docks along the base side of the bay adjacent to Kim and Toby were beginning to show signs of new life as the work crews returned from the open water. Wheeled submarine vehicles of weld glass, awkward with jointed work arms and booms, were crawling up the ceramic rack ramps to the dock runways. They exhaled in snorting whistles as they blew their after hull compression tanks. Those chambers would be reset at the working pressures of the next day for the men using shield suits and tanks. The men now exiting from them, usually in groups of four, began to unload equipment: laser lights, pulsar tubes, drug-guns, sections of glasswire nets, laboratory gear, and assorted tools.

The swimmers, mostly wardens working the near-shore depths, began to pad up the ramps, nearly all of them wearing the silco-membrane; skin fitting suits which served literally as artificial lungs. Tiny tube follicles from their inner lining penetrated pores to supply the swimmers with oxygen directly from the water and removed the carbon dioxide from the swimmer’s bodies at the same time. They were fine for depths down to a few hundred feet, and by the time young sea wardens served their in-sea apprenticeship they were conditioned to their use.

Seemingly each new generation of Service personnel came born with a little extra musculature about thicker, yet more flexible, rib cages, and a denser layer of muscles over the lower abdomen. Seemingly, the sea changes in the altered oceans applied to the humans who worked in them as well as other life forms.

“Here they come now,” said Kim, watching a set of shadows take solid shapes at the dock ramp beneath them.

“And bringing their sheep behind them,” giggled Toby Lee.

Kim laughed. Two huge dorsal fins carved tracings in the water surface behind the swimmers. Two more, as large but thicker, bubbled behind them and suddenly turned into a pair of dolphins which lifted in a burst of foam and grinned at them.

Tuktu and Genright hauled out, kicking off fins and peeling down silco skin to their waists. They saw Kim and Toby, and Tuktu shouted.

“Every day, every minute, my popularity grows. Tomorrow they may follow me into the shower.”

He turned and shook a handful of droplets toward the bay.

“Good-bye, dear people. Good-bye, good-bye. Tuktu will see you again. Don’t break any teeth until I come.”

Kim, half listening to Tuktu clown, noticed a barely perceptible shiver ripple across Genright’s shoulders, and a wry grimace cloud his face. Genright did not look happy. He apparently did not think Tuktu was very funny.

“Get cleaned up,” yelled Toby. “I’ve got big news.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Kim.

“You had that know-it-all look when I came down, and I didn’t get a real buddy smile. You can wait too.”

“So there, young hero,” chuckled Tuktu, scratching at his chin. “I ought to use some of that sea anemone face wash. Juice from that critter will dissolve a beard right down to your tonsils,” He banged Genright on the back. “Good day’s work, my skinny one. Let’s clean up and eat with these strangers.”

Genright said nothing at all.

Toby’s big news was apparently everybody’s big news in the mess hall. There was more of a buzz than usual hovering over the turtle steaks and garden alva salad.

“We’ve got a Cryo coming,” announced Toby Lee. “He’s been in the cities for months taking everything from extra sensory reorientation from the ESPERS to new physical overhaul from the body bank builders. He’s making a tour of the Marine bases. What’s more, he’s one of the original shark experts. His work helped lead to the artificial stock-breeding processes we use in the pens. He’s going to lecture here, and work here for…well, I don’t know….”

“Where did they get him?” asked Tuktu.

“I heard somewhere in the Antarctic. One of the Sea Rovers reported a big iceberg break from an old land mass. An exploration team found a crypt. It was damaged with the exception of one function vault. In it was this Cryo, and find. His name is Ury Kaane, and they think he’s ancient Finnish or Russian.”

“How old,?” asked Genright, making a face.

“This is only gossip,” explained Toby, “but I heard that in biological time he’s maybe in his late forties….”

“How about chronological time?” interrupted Kim softly.

Toby hesitated. “I don’t know. Before the war, and some say way before that, like late twentieth century or early twenty-first…”

Tuktu whistled. There was a grunt from Genright.

Kim shivered, and it wasn’t from cold.

“Could be as much as fifteen hundred years?”

They knew about the Cryos. The history machines were explicit, and ever so rarely one or sometimes more appeared to help the cities patch up breaks in the science patterns or lapses in the history data or research gaps in the psychosocial correlations. Some appeared and as rapidly vanished. They were dangers to some phase of life balance in the hive burrows.

The Cryos were the Long Sleepers. Their name came from one of the old sciences called cryogenic interment. It was a deep freeze halt of functional metabolism coupled with complete preservation of all physical organs and cybernetic maintenance of all cell structures. The Sleepers slept away the centuries safe, sound, and intact within the hidden functional vaults with only occasional life currents lighting the dormant nerve links within the brain to stir some seldom dream.

The Cryos were stockpiled humanity placed away for the future by governments able to foresee impending disaster for the earth, but unable to halt it. Most of them were geniuses; healers, conservationists, physicists, biologists, mathematicians, metallurgists, engineers, men to rebuild future environments, and quite a few women too. Many of them were young, and many worn with illnesses, once fatal, which awaited some discovered cure by the science of future years to come. All of them were volunteers.

Kim remembered one of his old city instructors shaking his head sadly and saying, “It may be that the world gained nothing. By the time the science of cryogenic interment was perfected, it was too late. The poets, for instance, had disappeared.”

The routines of reappearance were always the same. The Cryos were reoriented, rehabilitated, welcomed back to society and asked to contribute to it within their own specialties.

The re-born residents from the past were, for the most part, cherished.

They were also watched.

Baja Base turned out a welcome for Cryo Ury Kaane. Assistant Commander Jiggs Jensen, the soft-voiced giant who served as Commander Torrance’s executive officer, said he hadn’t seen so many technicians since the last big seismic storm and the waves that put the laboratories, barracks and outbuildings thirty fathoms below sea level. That was the storm, he said, that clogged up all the vent pipes with sea urchins, and when they pumped the flues dry and blew the living pincushions a half mile out to sea, the otters thought it was raining free lunch and sent in a thank-you note. They used an urchin spine and hammered it into the shell of a friendly loggerhead turtle and pointed him toward shore. His carapace was so hard that they busted up a dozen clamshells banging in the note, and gave the turtle hiccups from vibration in his innards. Assistant Commander Jensen often stretched the truth a bit.

Actually, the technicians did not appear in great numbers. The Service was spread thin in that region, but they were representative. A few miners working the magnesium nodule beds on the continental slope from the deep submergence crawlers got in touch with Base and were picked up by light hovercraft. A few weather people living on the forecast and control buoys came in to meet the Cryo. A handful of wardens got leave from the northern kelp beds.

Most of the pelagic herdsmen tending migratory pods of California gray whales couldn’t make it. But a delegation of government came down from the Denver hive by freight rocket with some machinery and a load of organic wastes. And wonder of wonders, at least for Kim, a Sea Rover showed up who had intercepted the news off old Peru.

The Sea Rovers were the wide-ranging elite of the Service and the last step up the chain of command before Shore Duty Stations. They were the explorer-intelligence branch, proficient in many of the ocean sciences, and many of their missions were assigned directly by the Council of the Joint Cities.

Someday, someday, thought Kim, I’ll be one.

Oddly enough, Toby Lee did not share his ambition or his enthusiasm. When he spoke to her about that goal she shrugged it off or changed the conversation, and sometimes she banged her fists together in a flash of anger. He didn’t know why. After all, there had been and were female Sea Rovers as well as men.

But, so what, he thought. Right now the entire base seemed curiously festive.

Cryo Ury Kaane was going to be around for a while. He would lecture and conduct some laboratory classes. He would conduct them first, however, for the visiting technicians. Routines of young wardens assigned to Baja Base would go on as usual.

“Down with us young,” said Tuktu.

“Which is where the work is,” added Toby Lee.

“Where the company smiles too much,” said Genright surprisingly.

“And where, according to the schedule signed by Mr. Jensen in his own handwriting, tomorrow the four of us will repair and rest some baffle nets,” groaned Kim.

“Oh, fun, fun, funny fun, and I thank you, Mr. Jenson,” muttered Tuktu. “I do need the exercise.”

“And if he should hear you,” giggled Toby Lee, “you’d be building lots and lots of new muscles.”

Kim thought about that the next day. He could use a few new muscles.

They had loaded one of the four-man, weld-glass subs at daybreak with net repair equipment and eased off for the run down the bay to the sector marked on the work schedule. They wore shield suits, and would don the small tanks for water work. The shield suits were more awkward to work in than the silco skins, but they offered more protection against possible shark bumping.

There are many differences between the sharks, whose skeletons are made of cartilage, and the fishes that have bony skeletons like man’s. One of them is that the placoid scales, which cover the armor-like skin of the shark, are really denticles, or actual teeth. They give the rough hide of most sharks a scratchy surface that can tear and cut a swimmer’s flesh even through a silco skin.

Cuts bleed. And so sensitive are the organs of smell in most sharks that even the smallest scent diffusion of blood in the water can assemble schools of sharks seeking food.

Shield suits were better for working in, in and around the herds.

There were always some sharks nosing about the baffle nets. That’s why the nets were there in the first place.

They were set in grid patterns of deceptive simplicity. They were of varying length, some only twenty or thirty feet in length, and were set at varying depths, some only a few feet from the bottom, others near the surface. Most of them were placed to intersect currents that sharks might want to follow. And their major purpose was to break up big schools. Great concentrations led to trouble in the herds; fights, for instance, and cannibalism among size groups.

The nets also discouraged the hungrier types from ranging too far south in the great bay to the nursery grounds where the females were grouped to have their pups.

It took more than nets to discourage some of them today.

All through the morning, as the two teams strung new anchor lines or substituted new webbing and checked top-net buoys, they had company. Pairs, trios, quartets, and groups of cruisers, some thirty feet long, poked up to supervise the work.

“Do you suppose they’re more curious on some days than on others?” asked Toby Lee during a work break in the compression chamber of the four-man vehicle now sitting on the bottom under a hundred feet of water.

“They don’t trust us to do it right,” said Tuktu.

“They sure aren’t helping,” added Kim. “And if we want to finish this job, we’re going to have to shoosh ‘em back from the work area. Two of us can do that while two of us work nets, then we’ll change about until the job’s done. What do you think?”

“Pulsars,” said Toby Lee, “but nice and gentle. This section of bay runs to big ones today, and I wouldn’t want anybody out there to get unhappy.”

“We’ll take herd duty first,” said Kim.

“While I sweat and strain and Genright hands me the exact tools I don’t need,” grinned Tuktu. “Let’s get at it, and make sure our communicators communicate. I like to know where everybody is.”

“I’d like to be someplace else,” muttered Genright.

Kim glanced at him sharply.

Tuktu checked himself and popped out the hatch.

The water was clear and tinged with a silvery green from the high-riding sunlight on the bay above them. Visibility was excellent; one could count the tiny bubbles of their passage, close-set bubbles because the water was gluey and heavy, and probably high in salt content.

Kim and Toby swam up current from the net Genright and Tuktu were realigning.

Kim checked the communicator in his facemask. He raised both Tuktu and Genright. He reset for Baja Base and checked in with a report.

“Two working, two chasing,” he said. “Very nosy down here, and very big noses.”

“Read you Rockwell, out.”

Kim changed back to their own warble frequency.

He and Toby carried small pulsar tubes, hand-handy, and about two feet in length. They were variable pitch resonators and could be set to emit sound pulses at any interval and in any selected vibration pattern.

“Very low?” asked Toby, twisting away from a gliding Fusiform body that moved like a passing shadow some eighteen feet long.

“Very low,” agreed Kim.

The sense of smell is the most acute of all shark senses. It is closely followed by what, in humans, would be the sense of hearing, the ability to detect sounds and vibrations, particularly low-frequency ones. Most fish have that sense and many ocean mammals, especially the dolphins.

In sharks the sensing equipment, which handles most of this sound detection, is known as the lateral line. It runs around the side length of a shark like a horizontal tunnel of nerves. It is a tunnel, which sends out sense-collection tubes that end as pores on the outer skin.

The old scientists of the sea suspected that the lateral line was sort of a “radio receiver” which served sharks as a means of long range “touch.” They assumed that it also had something to do with the sharks’ graceful and eternal swimming balance. They knew that when the nerves, which linked the lateral line to the brain, were cut sharks failed to “sense” movement in the water.

Kim and Toby beamed a low-toned, mild buzz from their pulsar tubes as they swam across the path of a few oncoming brutes. It was set at a training frequency, a gently annoying one. The sharks turned, taking their business elsewhere. One of them winked a round blue eye, pulling an eyelid up from the bottom of the eye instead of down from the top, as if to say he really didn’t care about nosing into the net at all.

Toby and Kim swam leisurely, easily, and with little bodily movement. Wariness was better than hurry in the great bay. There were always marine types, which thought otherwise, however.

“Upstairs,” said Toby.

Kim tilted his body. Eighty feet above them a solo sea turtle, looking like a silver coin, some twelve feet in diameter was boiling along in the final stages of some fantastic boat race. All four flippers moved in rhythm like oars. There was wake behind its tail, which was busy as a rudder.

“He’s late for a down-bay date,” grunted Kim.

“Tag game,” said Toby.

Right behind the turtle was a dolphin. It was sizable, some twenty feet long. And it looked as if it had some impish design on the turtle’s tail.

“Man, he’s goofing off for games instead of minding the store. I wondered when one or more of them would show up.”

“All you had to do was warble if you wanted any of them,” said Toby.

“Let’s keep it peaceful. It isn’t roundup time.”

Tuktu’s voice interrupted them.

“Chat, chat, chat,” it said. “There’s one more little section of weave to fit, and you two can come do it.”

The teams swapped places, Toby and Kim handing over the pulsars in exchange for tools.

“Ought not to be too long now,” reported Tuktu.

Kim thought he heard the whisper, although it came thready and more like an impression than a statement.

“Anytime down here is too long.”

“You say something, Genright?” he asked.

There was no answer as Tuktu and Genright swam off, and Kim and Toby began to work. Toby was silent.

Kim felt again that vague stirring of uneasiness about Genright. He forced himself to think about it in terms of the Service and his long training. He thought about it in terms of his still comparatively new rank. He put the last tie on a weave of glass netting, went down the anchor line to make certain that the fittings and swivels on the anchor holdfast would be firm and yet flexible enough to take water motion and net banging from even trapped sharks. Once in a while one tangled in the mesh despite the smallness of the weave.

He thought about Genright in terms of Tuktu and their closeness as a team. If anything at all impaired the functioning ability of one partner it could risk the life of the other. The sea does not forgive mistakes. Small errors, and above all the fears which led to them, could end in disaster.

“Anything wrong?” asked Toby in a small voice.

She had the habit of walking right into his mind and sharing it. As she did so again, he wondered if Tuktu shared the same entry to thoughts and feelings with Genright. In-sea buddy teams did. The Service saw to that.

“Yes,” he said.

“You’d better fix it.”

Kim finished his chore. The water was changing hue. The silvery green of the high sun was deepening into the blue cast of smoke haze and visibility was dropping with the afternoon descent of the light into the Pacific.

He nodded the communicator to conference call to state the end of the work. As he did so there was a sharp command, which almost rattled his mask.

“Turn it, Genright. Turn it!”

Kim heard a sodden thud. He spun in the water to get a look at the up current side of the net where Tuktu and Genright were discouraging visitors. He heard a rising note drone up the sound scale of the pulsar tube. There was a hissing crunch near the base of the net. A great gray-white shark was turning away, retreating into the water haze.

“It’s Tuktu at the base of the net. He’s bottomed and he’s hurt!” said Toby Lee steadily.

“Come in Genright,” snapped Kim.

He and Toby swam to the sea floor and eased Tuktu into a floating carry. As they did so Genright joined them.

Together they made their way to the work sub.

Tuktu was limp as they pulled him into the compression chamber. He had lost his mask. The compact tank was askew, and Toby removed it. She loosened the fastenings on Tuktu’s shield suit. And he shook his head as she did so.

“Wow,” he moaned. “Just wow.”

“What happened?” demanded Kim firmly.

“Saw it coming and ran into a swipe of the tail,” said Tuktu. “Careless, I guess.” His voice was low but even and determined.

“I asked what happened,” said Kim. “Report, Genright, and now.”

“I didn’t do the job,” he answered. “It was a big one. I was afraid. I got out of its way. Tuktu never saw it at all, I think. It came fast. Not mean. Just fast. When it veered, the tail flicked him.”

“Good thing it didn’t catch me in the head,” said Tuktu, trying to smile.

Kim looked steadily at Genright.

Genright rubbed a weary hand across his face, swiping at its wetness. Some of that wetness was tears.

Kim was suddenly very tired. He looked at Toby. He snapped the communicator to Baja Base. “Job done,” he said, fighting a thickness in his throat. “We’re coming in. You might have a doc at the ramp. Tuktu got banged. He might have sore ribs.” A tail blow could also kill....

They were a quiet group on the way home, and conversation was brief at the ramp where a medical pickup waited to check out Tuktu who walked stiff-gaited to meet it. They had shed the shield suits for shorts and shirts.

“If you can walk, you can run,” said one of the young medical attendants. “At least, you aren’t all mincemeaty and horrid.”

Tuktu stared at Kim.

“Not me,” he said. “The report goes with the rank.”

Kim nodded. There was a small twist at the corner of his mouth. Toby noticed it and lifted her hand toward him. Tuktu saw the movement, and understood it.

Genright walked steadily off the dock and never offered a hand with the unloading.

If you can’t stop thinking about how to say it, then just think about getting it said because it has to be said. Kim was miserable. It was an hour before he made the request to see Commander Torrance, and an aide told him to come right up to the headquarters office. He had avoided the evening meal, and Toby had gone for a walk down the beach so he would not have to avoid her.

There was a handsome blur of smoke-orange light at the far rim of the sea, and it made the commander’s desk appear to float as it filled the window behind it. Assistant Commander Jiggs Jensen leaned against a corner of the desk, silhouetted and huge. An onrush of after glow from the sunset made office lights unnecessary.

“You’re late, Rockwell,” said Torrance from the dusk in his face.

“Late sir?” queried Kim.

“I figured it would take you less time. Mr. Jensen disagreed. He ventured that you might not come at all. Mr. Jensen was wrong, which should cause him some embarrassment.”

“Well, sir,” said Kim.

“As you know, I check all accidents in the pens and all herd mishaps. I happen to think that Tuktu Barnes is a warden of promise. I went to see him. He has three cracked ribs, which do not interfere with his appetite. You have nothing wrong with you, but you did not eat dinner.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kim.

“Tuktu said you would be along. He said that before he told me the whole story of Genright’s performance and its cause.”

“He did, sir?” Kim felt a flash of heat at the tips of his ears and a blaze of blush at his cheekbones. He was glad the office was not too brightly lighted. The thought occurred to him that his commanding officers were considerate men and that the dimness was deliberate. His face felt hotter.

“Tuktu has been Genright’s in-sea buddy for a long time. He is also a perceptive person. And, incidentally, he gives you credit for the same sort of perception. He has known since the first day that he and Genright came to Baja that Genright was afraid of sharks. He has also known how well and hard Genright has fought himself to beat that fear. And he is convinced that Genright will beat it. Have you anything to add?”

“Only that I’m glad Tuktu told you, sir. I might not have gotten my report exactly right.”

“Tuktu didn’t think so. He said that you would have done it justice. Would you care to make any recommendation?”

“I don’t know enough, sir,” said Kim, “but....”

“But what?”

“I think that Genright’s fight isn’t really all his own.. It’s Tuktu’s as well, and mine, and it belongs to a lot of us. But, at the same time, it adds a risk down there we could do without. But maybe as long as we know about that risk we could help Genright win his battle.”

“Make your recommendation, Rockwell.”

“Return him to duty with confidence, sir.”

“That’s your idea, eh?”

Kim felt reckless. “Not all of it,” he said. “Most of it seems to be Tuktu’s.”

“We’ll consider it, and thank you, Rockwell.” Commander Torrance paused. He rattled a rumble around in his throat, sort of a decision-making noise. He stared at Assistant Commander Jensen who turned to face him.

“I’ll tell him,” said Jensen softly. “Rockwell, you may or may not know it, but Mr. Torrance and I worked as an in-sea team for many years. We went Rover that way as well. My Service record so far is sound if not distinguished. I was once moved and reassigned from shark holdings on another coast because I was petrified at working with those animals. I still am, and outside of some drastic surgery between my ears, I don’t think I’ll ever be cured. And if you ever mention one word of this to anyone, you will wind up picking lichens in the polar north for the rest of your career.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Kim.

“Let’s get some lights on in here,” said Mr. Torrance.

“Good night, son.”

Mr. Jensen rose. He flicked on a switch. But as Kim turned to leave there was a knock on the office door.

“Come in,” said the commander brightly. “Ah, yes,” he added. “Wait a moment, Rockwell.”

The man who walked through the doorway was small, stockily compact, and trim in a Service blouse with no insignia. He moved almost daintily. His close-cropped hair was night black. Kim had the impression that his features were regular, if flushed with new sunburn. His eyes as he glanced into the room were bright with interest. They held violet tints.

But as Kim caught and held their direct look they darkened. Kim fought a flinching sensation. He seemed to be gazing through two holes in some remote space, and that space dark, lost, and terribly lonesome.

Those eyes looked across a void and knew emptiness, but only for a shred of a second, and then they sparkled at him.

“Warden Rockwell, this is Mr. Ury Kaane, now assigned to this base for special duty. As the work rotations permit, you and the younger wardens will attend his class and lectures starting, I believe, tomorrow,” said the commander.

“How do you do, sir,” said Kim.

The man’s handclasp was light but firm, and his voice offered a cheerful secret. “Yes,” it said, “the Cryo.”

“Good night, Rockwell.” He was dismissed.

There were lights in the base buildings, but he found Toby Lee sitting in the dark on the steps of the dormitory barracks she shared with a group of female technicians. There was a nearly invisible shape hunched beside her.

“Hi, you,” she cried.

“Who’s with you?”

“Genright,” she answered.

“Well, old Genright can go swipe me something to eat, can old Genright. I missed my dinner on account of old Genright, and old Genright is definitely not all that special to me.”

He could hear the relief in Genright’s exhaled breath, and Toby Lee’s giggle made flute music in the night.

There were not too many in the audience the next morning when Kim and Toby Lee entered the laboratory lecture room. The Baja Base was also a rest and recreation center, and the transients unless specifically assigned were not about to sit indoors. Many of them had already heard Ury Kaane. But there was a group of plankter specialists in from a trawl, a handful of benthic analysts up from the wild life on the bay bottom, a scattering of communications experts torn from their sonar-radar-TV-pulse, beam-heat sensing and electronic networks. There were also Genright and Tuktu, wearing a vest splint of algae gel to ease his ribs.

Kim noticed with some surprise that Commander Torrance and his executive officer Jensen were there, and with them a man wearing dark government garb better suited to the cities than the open marine atmosphere.

“Who’s he,?” Kim asked softly.

“I have heard that sometimes Cryos are escorted by people who help them to adapt to our ways, and to protect them,” answered Toby. “I don’t really know, and it could be only a rumor.”

Ury Kaane seemed perfectly at home as Commander Torrance introduced him. He was relaxed, poised, and he gave the impression of a man pleased to share professional opinions among professionals. His face showed age lines that Kim had not noticed in Torrance’s office, but he stood like an athlete. The violet eyes were bluer today, regarding, if somewhat quizzical.

His voice was wryly gay as he began to talk.

“I am pleased to be in your world with you. My knowledge of it is imperfect. It appears to be better than the one I stepped away from for a nap. It has the advantage of existence. I have been asked, as a natural scientist of the past, to make some comparisons between that past and what I have seen so far of our mutual present.

“The biggest difference I have observed is that this world cherishes its natural environment. It considers human actions in the light of possible consequences upon that environment because it knows that it is essential to human life. My world did not. It perished.

“I can tell you that it would have died without the last war.”

“I don’t know whether I like my history this way,” whispered Toby Lee.

Kim was silent.

Ury Kaane spoke simply. He described how pre-war industrial man had polluted the air he breathed by robbing it of oxygen and filling it with carbon dioxide from millions of fuel-burning devices. He described the methodic destruction of millions of acres of growing green plants, which could have converted that carbon dioxide into priceless oxygen through photosynthesis. He spoke of the chemical, the organic and heat pollution of earth’s lakes, rivers, and seas, which destroyed the micro-organisms, which formed the base of the human food chain. He recalled the waste products of the early atomic energy adventures, which released biologically fatal isotopes into both soil and atmosphere.

The lab lecture room was hushed to everything but the metronome of Ury Kaane’s voice.

He talked of pesticides and herbicides and of precious arable land made salt and useless by desperate irrigation projects that sought to stave off starvation for a world overburdened by too many people.

“The men of my time knew the dangers of environmental destruction,” he said. “Children were taught about them in our schools. But man forgot that man was only a part of earth’s total life even though its dominant form. My people risked, and knowingly risked, the survival of man as a species for short-term material comforts and called the process civilization. They lost. Total nuclear war was only an anticlimax.”

There was no passion in Ury Kaane’s voice, but Kim sensed a thread of pain. There was pride there too.

The Cryo told of the men who, foreseeing the need for human reseeding, had shaped the prototype hive cities. The men who had stocked them and stored them with all of the science and knowledge possible to assemble for those who might come after them.

“This world has endured on much of that science and on the new ones you have created to meet the conditions of a greatly altered natural environment. I am amazed at how much of the old you have kept, and what you have chosen or have been forced to discard, perhaps because of a lack of stable metals. I have not been here too long, but I am told that the remains of what we once knew as a program designed to reach our neighboring planets and stars endures only as a weather control system still in its forecast stages. I am amazed, although perhaps I should not be, how much of earth has yet to be re-explored and its conditions re-examined before the hives, which gave the race haven, can emerge once more to the sunlight.

“I have assumed that the greatest need is still food supply, although your social sciences and your psycho-medical advances have kept the demands for it within reach of the potential supply.”

The Cryo paused. He smiled.

“The sea which gave us birth more than ever gives us life.”

Commander Torrnace rose as Ury Kaane finished.

“Dismissed,” he said. “And I wish Warden Rockwell to remain a moment.”

“I’ll wait for you,” nodded Toby Lee, and rounded up Genright and Tuktu with a wave of her arm and point to the door.

Commander Torrance was brief.

“Selsor stays on duty without prejudice. Tuktu is pleased. You are pleased. But I am adding Toby Lee to their in-sea team for temporary duty.”

He paused. “I didn’t see anything special about you last night, but our visitor did. He has asked that you be detailed to him as an aide, sort of a handy type…. Did you see anything special about yourself last night that might have caused that request?”

Those lost eyes that saw darkness, thought Kim.

“No, sir,” he said.

“One more thing, I want you to meet someone else.”

The man in the dark government city suit was suddenly at the commander’s elbow.

“This is Mr. Brent, assigned by the Council of Cities to special duty. He too is an associate of Mr. Ury Kaane.”

Mr. Brent looked as if he had once commanded something more than a wet suit. He was broad in the shoulders and his eyes were sea-green and probing. His voice was soft yet somehow curt.

“Rockwell,” he mused, “we shall see something of each other. Do well.” He hesitated. “Cryo Ury Kaane is a valuable guest.”

“That’s it,” said Commander Torrance. “Today play. Duties tomorrow.”

They were waiting for him outside the building. Toby was scratching Tuktu’s back with a sharp stone where it itched under the gel splint vest, and Genright was figuring out a better method.

“You can take this baby octopus, see, and centrally locate it in the middle of your back, see. Then stand over by the live tank in one of the labs and let it wave to its mother….”

“Suppose its mother was out to lunch when I itched?”

“Suppose Toby Lee was out to lunch?”

“I’d back into a building and wiggle.”

“With an octopus on your back?”

“I would have given it a day off.”

“That’s nice, then it could go out to lunch with its very own mother.”

“How about taking me out to lunch?” interrupted Kim.

“You got eight arms?” asked Tuktu.

“I could borrow.”

“Not my clean white one,” said Genright.

“Two from Toby Lee then.”

“Not without marriage,” she snapped, “and cut it out! What’s with you and the command performance inside?”

“We’re divorced. You join Tuktu and Genright who is a man in all-around fine standing while I become an orderly to the Cryo. Shall we all go somewhere and try to figure it out?”

“Not without marriage,” grinned Tuktu.

Toby Lee kicked him in the shins.

“Put a gel splint on that,” she cooed.

They borrowed a flat-bed beach haul, which was nothing but a solar-powered battery on slats usually used to gather kelp hay or haul a meat turtle from the pens. They lurched up several miles of beach to one of the inlets and flopped beside it to watch the sluice boil with incoming food fishes chased from the open sea.

“You met that Cryo last night and he liked you,” said Toby Lee, “and he asked for you and he got you. Why you? Just why you? And the special duty. Mr. Brent says that Ury Kaane is a valuable guest. I know he’s a great pioneer biologist and shark expert. The labs around here are full of great specialists. What does Mr. Kaane from way back there know that they don’t?”

“They’d discover that in the cities. Maybe they think he knows more than he has remembered as yet, something useful…” Kim’s voice trailed off. “Or maybe something else.”

“Very complicated,” said Genright.

Tuktu was thoughtful. “You must have done something to make him ask for you, or sensed something.”

“Lets forget the whole thing. I have my orders, and I’ve told you what yours will be when they reach you all nice and formal. Just one more thing for two male wardens around here, let my bubble buddy take care of you down there. She’ll keep you out of mischief. Animals like her.”

Whatever Ury Kaane knew that he hadn’t remembered certainly didn’t interfere with his work as the days went by. His lectures on comparative anatomy studies were crisp and right from the laboratory to the classrooms. He reviewed the early work, which led to selective breeding and the creation of livestock use among sharks. He was vastly interested in what he called accelerative change in the life of the sea, due, as he thought, to atomic bombardment and the shifting alterations in the relations of adjusting factors.

Kim discovered something about the man every day. He learned that the Cryo was a fine diver who adapted to and delighted in the silco skins, shield suits, and the equipment available for in-sea routines.

He learned something else when Ury Kaane first expressed his wish to work in the bay. He learned it from Commander Torrance and Mr. Brent, who were blunt.

“Rockwell, he is your responsibility down there. Make very certain that his science stays sane, that he takes no chances whether he sees risk or not.”

But Ury Kaane went among the sharks as if he owned them, and with deftness and surety. He turned Kim’s mind out learning actual processes, forcing Kim to learn more in order to teach the Cryo.

The shark pens, quite literally most of the more than seven thousand square miles of Jewel Bay with the exception of the shallow farms at the landlocked south, were simply one big stock-herding operation. The entire north end of the bay held the “beef” males which, when they reached maximum size and girth, were rounded up and prepared for market. The middle portion of the bay was the harem where once a year the females were herded to and spun through mating enclosures and artificially “seeded” through the ingenious use of false claspers.

This was dangerous work. It was made less hazardous during the mating season by mild diffusions of nerve gas, worked out to laboratory formula and seeped into the bay waters by divers, all of them working with tanks. The sharks’ highly developed scent mechanisms provided their own anesthesia, enough to make them reasonably torpid, but not enough to halt their swimming abilities. A shark must live by constant motion and with a constant flow of water taken through its mouth to enrich its slit gill rakers with oxygen.

Once mated, the females were herded back to the harem. From there, in due course, they were moved again to the shallow nursery grounds to bear their litters, dropping young fully equipped to fend for life at birth. And there too the pups were separated according to the sexes for relocation.

The bay herds were a product of long breeding efforts, and so-called “standard stock.” But no effort of man had ever made the shark anything less than a marvelously weaponized stomach forever in search of food, and ferocious in the quest.

Man’s control over them was never taken for granted. Even with dolphin assistance, even with the pulsars, stun guns, lasers, and the dilute gases, even with ample supplies of food in the bay, there was danger in the shark pens. There were unpredictable and bloody frenzies in the herds. There were cannibal attacks. There were accidents.

Ury Kaane in one of his many conversations with Kim once said, “The nature of evolution is that no species can stand still. It goes forward evolving into something. It can never go back. But I think that the sharks defy that process or else nature took three hundred and fifty million years to catch up to the survival equipment sharks came with at creation.

“Look at those teeth,” he continued, banging on a specimen head in the laboratory. “Here are five rows in the upper and lower jaws. They are on active duty. Behind them lying in grooves deep inside the jaw are row after row of reserve troops. When a tooth is broken, smashed or lost, another moves right up to replace it from an endless escalator. And more teeth are developing at the same time to join the reserves. And all that from the beginning of the beginnings….

“Look at that jaw, each one hinged at the center, and each one jointed again at the corners of the mouth. Man, when that mouth is open it could take a whole horse.” He paused and said softly, “I wonder what ever happened to the horses?”

One of the many discoveries Kim made and enjoyed about the Cryo was his way of interrupting his own thoughts with other little secret thoughts, many of them meaningless to Kim.

There was a day when they were walking along a portion of beach blotched with sparse grasses. Ury Kaane flopped on the crystalline sand and placed an ear among them.

He listened long and cocked an eye up at Kim.

“No insects,” he said. “no rustles, hums, buzzes, chirps. When they are heard again…ah ha…”

There was another time they watched a session of gulls convened about a small tidal pool.

“Sea birds, yes, and that’s good,” Said Ury Kaane. “But somewhere in the world there has to be a place where birds sing.”

Kim was spending a lot of time with the Cryo, not only in his classes, which he attended as a student with Toby Lee, Genright, and Tuktu, but in the working lab keeping records, in the bay among the sharks as Ury Kaane made his insatiable observations, and often during off hours walking and loafing.

Occasionally, Commander Torrance and Mr. Brent would ask him questions about the Cryo. They were circular questions, thought Kim. They were questions which just sort of went around and around in search of something to seek. Commander Torrance showed no signs of changing Kim’s duties. In fact, he seemed pleased with Kim’s relationship with Ury Kaane.

“His reports on you make me think you may turn out to be some sort of special credit to the Service someday,” he told Kim.

Toby Lee took a different view.

“You’re no credit to me,” she said. “When are you going to come back to work?”

“Why?” asked Kim. “You having trouble with Tuktu and Genright?”

“Noooooooo,” she admitted. “But Genright’s still sort of uncertain, and somehow any job takes longer for the three of us to do than two of us used to be able to manage. Frankly, with that thing he has about sharks… Well, he’s got me looking around too….”

Kim smiled at her. When you look around, imagine I’m right behind you. Temporary duty is called temporary because…”

“It lasts so long,” snapped Toby Lee. “I’ll have to think up a drastic change.”

Toby did not have to bother.

There were odd streaks in the sky over the Pacific the next day at dusk as if a giant had made an immense sandwich of violently colored smoke and rested it on the table formed by the horizon, as Kim and Ury Kaane left the laboratory. The air had a strange tart taste. The sea beneath it, while slick and queerly still, was broken by what looked like pockmarks of miniature boilings.

“Odd, very odd,” mused Ury Kaane.

Kim felt a faint, faraway ringing in his ears.

The boilings on the sea became geysers. The ground was suddenly snatched from under them and they were spilled to an earth, which rippled, rose, and fell like a wave. There was a sound like the loudest bass note of all time, which turned into a booming rumble of drums from somewhere deep in the heart of the ground.

A corner of one of the barracks building tilted and fell.

Kim staggered to his feet in time to see the surf lift into a single wall of water and surge over the barrier island to wash white water into the bay.

The rumble faded, leaving his ears twanging, and the ground beneath him steadied. The sky spun back into place.

He ran to the sprawl that was Ury Kaane and lifted him to his feet where he swayed, dazed, but apparently uninjured. Kim held him steady and looked anxiously into his face for signs of harm.

The Cryo’s eyes seemed to be staring into eternity with that same wide, lonesome probe into blackness Kim had seen before, a probe, which found some unspeakable pain and loss. Ury Kaane’s lips moved and tried for words.

“Earthquake,” shouted Kim. “Bad tremor. This coast has a history of them.”

“Bobby, Bobby,” said the Cryo distinctly. “You went to the shelter city in Hawaii with your mother, the volcano city beneath the two mountains before I went away…before I went away….”

Kim was a product of Service Training and discipline. He knew shock when he saw it. He slapped the Cryo’s tortured face.

The black light lifted from Ury Kaane’s eyes. He shook his head and recognized Kim.

“I’m all right,” he said.

There were people running toward them. One of them was Mr. Brent who led Ury Kaane away. One of them was Toby Lee who grabbed both Kim’s hands and held them tightly.

Baja Base was landscaped with litter, but it functioned. It coped with cleanup during the night, estimated quake damage, and patched its physical wounds. It tested its communications and examined its equipment and prepared for a survey of the shark pens in the morning. It slept in the end, but not before Kim asked for an interview with Commander Torrance.

He found the commander with Mr. Brent, and asked about Ury Kaane.

“Why now, Rockwell?” The commander was curt.

Kim glanced at Mr. Brent. He was certain that at last he had the answer to all those circular questions. He squared his shoulder stubbornly.

“I hope he’s well, sir,” he said steadily. “He thinks that I am his son and that I am with my mother in one of the cities named Hawaii.”

Mr. Brent’s lips tightened. His voice was soft but cold as a drifting berg.

“That’s it,” he said. “He had to know it. The psycho examinations showed something hidden. But in the Council of Cities there is no Hawaii…recognized or known….”

He made a small motion to Commander Torrance.

“Thank you, Rockwell. You are dismissed,” said the commander.

Baja Base rested but briefly. The sun had just lifted above the eastern scarps of the bay to put a pewter sheen on the ripples when all warden personnel went on full alert. The first reports from the crews checking possible quake damage in the shark herds brought news of slaughter, of blood-scarlet waters.

The voice, which brought the very first report, was never heard again. But the communications network had the word.

A pack of orcas, the killer whales, usually found in colder, northern waters, had raided south and entered the bay through a quake-damaged inlet, apparently pursuing a herd of seals.

Kim, restored to in-sea team status with Toby Lee, tried to remember what he knew about killer whales. They were relentless and fierce meat eaters who preyed upon the giant baleen whales, seals, walruses, fish, sea birds, and, like the sharks, even man. The ancient texts described specimens up to forty feet in length and spoke of their immense speed and strength. The pelagic herdsmen had encountered them in mutant variants up to ninety feet.

Orcas were not misnamed. They were killers with rending, conically pointed teeth, and they killed.

Toby and Kim joined Genright and Tuktu at the dock for hovercraft drop-off into their assigned work zone. They wore shield suits with helmets instead of masks. They carried tanks, one of them only a slim, tubular fitting to the air tank which contained nerve gas under pressure. They were armed with laser tubes to be used as both a light source and weapon. Compact pulsars rested in leg sheaths. Drug-guns were left behind. They would take too long to affect killer whales when fractions of seconds counted.

The two man jet subs powered by A-energy packs would, they hoped, handle actual combat with the orcas. They fired spreads of penetrating pencil darts designed for low intensity explosion within the bodies of the great bulk animals. Of course, widespread gas diffusions could be laid to destroy the killers. Ultrasonic emissions and a variety of paralytic poisons were available. But their use would demolish the herds and much of the benthic life as well.

Kim noticed two wardens in silco skin suits wearing artificial squid mantles, sort of a flexible, armored tube, which contracted and expanded under power units to “inhale” water and “eject” it from the rear of the mantle. The diver was thus a one-man, jet-propelled unit and capable of high swimming speeds. The two wardens using mantles were assigned to roving duties where needed.

By the time Kim and Toby and Tuktu and Genright boarded the hover vehicle the base sensing scans had pinpointed the location of the killer whale pack. It was amuck in the north beef herd, and when the four of them made their water entrance south of the carnage, the currents were murky with blood.

Their mission was to divert blood-wild sharks leaving the northern frenzy, where the orcas killed at will and panicked sharks killed each other, from entering the harem grounds in any numbers. They were to slay if necessary. If necessary and possible they were to deter pursuing killer whales, should any escape sub attacks.

“Set your buoyancy for mid-water,” ordered Kim, “and use manual controls to alter the masses of your weights for fast depth changes. Spread out and cruise and use lights. Everybody all right?”

“I’m happy to have a buddy,” warbled Toby Lee.

“What are you, Genright?” asked Kim.

“Chicken,” came the reply.

Two halves of two great sharks drifted and bobbed below them, one a head section, the other bearing a limp caudal fin.

“Double chicken,” said Genright.

“Take no chances,” commanded Kim. “Notch laser up to weapon strength when you see anything at all. And set communications to all bands now. We’ll know what’s going on up there, and we can still hear each other.”

Visibility was good, for the most part, from the high morning light on the bay surface above them, but it was patchy with both large and small clouds of stain.

A twenty-foot shadow lanced from one of them directly above Kim, and he sliced its length with the laser beam, which bored a small, boiling hole of heat in the water.

“One,” he said through the helmet intercom, “watch for more behind him.”

A school of foot-long anchovies passed over them like silver tinsel, blown south with their white underbellies gleaming. An oversized harbor seal, a long way from any port, made diligent speed of the surface.

A babble of command, counter command, and instruction between the jet subs now attacking the orca pack filled their helmets.

“Call those dolphins home. What are they doing in this mess?”

“Count twelve killers in pack.”

“No count shark dead from all causes, but herd milling in frenzy.”

“Circling outside, well outside the killing grounds,” reported one of the squid-mantle jet divers. “No stragglers. No whale stragglers, that is. Some sharks leaving, headed south.”

Minutes later Tuktu turned one of them with a scorching slant of laser and it angled for some distant shoreline as if to beach itself. Genright intersected another and beamed it dead with an angle shot across its snout.

“Mighty fancy,” cheered Toby Lee, seeing the action.

“Stay alert,” snapped Kim. “The big fight ought to be breaking up.”

“I hope the subs won,” said Tuktu.

Three monsters swimming nose to tail in a fleeing chain passed between Kim and Toby. With intuitive teamwork each refused a shot for fear of hitting each other. The sharks banged over a barrier net and glided away.

A voice shrilled into their helmets. “One orca loose from the pack and headed south fast, mad and wounded. Suggest intercept warden prepare…prepare…prepare….”

“To go back to bed,” suggested Tuktu.

“Close up, close up,” said Kim. “We’ll split as we see it, if it comes down this track. Might confuse it.”

Although he knew Base was monitoring all exchanges, he set the communicator direct to dispatch and command center. “Rockwell here, south zone direct of herd action. No sight of killer as yet.”

“Rockwell!” The voice was unmistakably Commander Torrance’s. “Get your patrol out of there. Do it now. Do not, repeat, do not attack that thing. Subs can deal with it later…. Confirm.”

“Too late, sir,” snapped Kim. “It’s here and…here…”

It came like a streamlined avalanche driving through the clouded water with tragic beauty, its mouth agape and its fluke driving. The dead-black silk of its giant back, broken only by the white oval over its eyes, was torn with a raw red gap behind its huge and proud dorsal. There was another red rent of ruin in its shining white belly.

The killer was a wreck of flesh, fully sixty feet long, yet still full of titanic strength and dedicated fury.

It saw them, and without changing its headlong course charged straight for the grouped swimmers, its lidless eyes fixed and baleful.

“Break,” cried Kim.

It was too late to spread.

Genright did not attempt to move laterally. He drove forward head on to meet the charging animal, his laser beamed directly into its open maw. As the killer angled upward to escape the pain, Genright dived beneath it, his laser tube held upright, cutting a direct route along the great beast’s belly, slicing, burning, and opening a crimson cavern from head to tail fluke.

Before the creature could spin to meet its tormentor three other laser tubes focused upon it and held their beams steady upon its mass.

Kim saw his light drive an ever-widening hole into the killer at the joint where flipper met body.

The killer’s head seemed to tilt away from its body as he watched. The great spiked teeth banged shut, and as life left the orca it seemed to collapse in upon itself, then separate into a spill of spare parts, which littered the sea around it. The water turned dark red, and as the monstrous carcass rolled it wrapped streamers of crimson about itself and, veiled within them, sank to the bottom.

“Lets get out of this blood,” yelled Toby Lee. “I don’t want more visitors attracted this way.”

“How about my old skinny buddy, Genright?” cried Tuktu. “How about that old fierce fella? Right into the hole like an eel on a reef! Did you know that killer whales are tougher than sharks, old skinny buddy?”

“Do I have to compare?” asked Genright, and there was a lofty cadence in his voice.

“Probably all day,” said Kim, “or at least until all the stock is doped into peaceful cruising.”

“Wrong, Rockwell,” cut in the drawling pre-command voice of Assistant Commander Jiggs Jensen back at Base. “I gather from your youthful chatter that Genright Selsor conquered all. But I digress. You are ordered to surface for pickup and return.”

“I knew they’d remember my cracked ribs,” chuckled Tuktu. “Will you scratch my back, Toby?”

“Genright will. He can do anything,” said Kim, “and to anything anytime.”

“Well it’s a mighty nice day for it,” answered Genright.

“You won’t have any more real bad ones,” said Tuktu soberly.

“Not the kind I had before anyhow, old square-shaped buddy,” agreed Genright.

Mr. Brent and Cryo Ury Kaane happened by the dock as they landed and managed a greeting. Then they stood solemnly and surveyed the young wardens as though they were measuring them for new silco suits. They appeared to be in silent conference.

Assistant Jiggs Jensen came by to watch them remove gear. He walked down to the ramp edge and tapped Genright on the shoulder.

“Congratulations,” he said.

“Thanks,” nodded Genright sincerely.

Kim resumed his duties with the Cryo the next day, and for some reason Tuktu, Genright, and Toby Lee were assigned additional laboratory work, which kept them under Ury Kaane’s instructive eye and out of shark-pen duty.

“Always a switch in this Service,” commented Tuktu.

“I don’t mind,” said Toby Lee, poking a finger into an ear in a distinctly undainty gesture.

Kim wondered and said nothing at all.

A week later he was summoned to Commander Torrance’s sea-view office, and again the all-places-all-the-time Mr. Brent was there. He took over the meeting as if he stood on a ship’s bridge.

“You will remember your report of events on the night of the quake. Cryo Ury Kaane has since, and with some assistance, recalled more about what he calls Hawaii shelter. An archipelago by that name shows on the ancient charts of the Pacific as a considerable chain of volcanic islands.”

He paused thoughtfully.

“I need not elaborate, but in the past two years we have had Rover reports of what might be called odd happenings in that area of the seas. Not enough to be certain, but enough to indicate that there might be directed activities throughout that section of the range which we are not directing.

“We intend to conduct an elaborate search of the area. Mr. Kaane will accompany that search, enthusiastically, I might add. He has requested that you be assigned to accompany him. Comment, Mr. Torrance?”

The commander picked up evenly.

“You will hold your Warden II rank, Kim,” he said, “but you will be designated as being on Rover duty. As you know, this is both an unusual move for the Service and great compliment to you. It is also a major opportunity for you….”

There was war within Kim. He felt a surge of exhilaration and great excitement. He felt a sickening sense of loss and sadness. The opposing forces fought for expression upon his face and were clearly seen.

Commander Torrance smiled, and the stiff Mr. Brent produced an antique, patently little used chuckle.

“When the Service makes an unusual move it moves quite unusually,” instructed the commander. “At Mr. Brent’s request and by his order as the representative of the Council of Cities, we are also detailing Barnes, Selsor, and Lee to the same assignment.”

Kim spun on his heel, remembered, spun back and snapped to attention and saluted. “Request permission to tell them, sir.”

“Dismissed,” said Torrance gravely.

“When the Service makes an unusual move it moves quite unusually,” bayed Kim at the quarter moon sneaking across the sky trying not to awaken the sea in its passing.

“Line up, gentlemen, for one sisterly kiss apiece,” sang Toby Lee.

“I wonder what’s out there,” wondered Genright.

“Wild, nasty, uneducated pelagic sharks,” said Tuktu.

The same stern thought silenced them simultaneously.

The sea range was out there.

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