Through the Eye of a Needle

8. Routine, Modified

It may not have been completely safe, but for the Hunter it was quite comfortable. A foot-and-a-half length of three-inch pipe had been secured with wire to one side of the concrete outer case of the metal-detector. A wooden plug closed the upper end of the pipe. The inner side of the plug held a small improvised electric switch, which closed the circuit in a two-strand wire leading upalong the rope which supported everything. The Hunter could send buzzer signals to those above, though they had no direct communication with him so far.

The bottom of the pipe was open, allowing the alien to look down with an eye composed of his own tissue. It was planned to make an artificial one for him from a lens and a short cylinder of opaque material, but this had not yet been completed. It would have advantages; the Hunter's flesh was not completely transparent, so that it did not make a particularly, and was not completely opaque so that his "eye" did not exclude stray light really well. He could see, but generally preferred other eyes to his own.

The bottom was very irregular, and the coral growing from it was even more so, so he had to keep sending "up" and "down" signals to the people above. The most inconvenient part of the setup was the fact that the phones of the detector were also up in the boat, and there was no convenient way for Bob and Jenny to let the Hunter know when the device responded. They had tried tying a string to a washer held in the Hunter's tissue inside the pipe, but there were so many spurious signals from the boat's own motion that this had been given up. Bob had suggested a flashlight bulb in the pipe, operated by a key in the boat through a separate circuit, but this had not yet been built.

Over a week had passed since Jenny's suggestion had been made. Between work and weather, very few hours had been spent in actual search. The vague beginnings of amap of the sea's bottom beyond the reef existed, but filled a very small fraction of the master sheet which Arthur Kinnaird had made, from the company map of the reef itself.

Checking the position of the boat every minute or two in order to keep track of the area which had been covered was a major nuisance, even though a brain-storming session in which all had participated one evening had resulted in a fairly rapid fix technique based on horizontal angles measured between corners of selected pairs of the tanks in the lagoon. The Hunter would buzz a number whenever he saw a fairly distinctive feature, and note its details with a piece of pencil graphite on a sheet of paper lining the pipe; at the sound of the buzz, those in the boat would measure and record position. During the evenings of days when they managed to work at all, the Hunter and Bob would correlate the sets of records, and make the appropriate additions to the main chart. There was a good deal of metal on the bottom; human beings seemed to have a tendency to lose things overboard. So far, all the specimens had been too small to give signals which could possibly be from a spaceship, except for one which had been found the first hour of operation. Checking it out had been long and complicated; the word had not reached the Hunter until the kayak had pulled into North Beach for rest and lunch. Afterward the site had to be found again, and the Hunter lowered to the bottom so that he could extend a pseudopod into the mud to analyze the object. It had proved to be a well-rusted, extremely large anchor. All the Hunter could do was buzz "no" to his crew. When he gave them the details later, they guessed it had been lost from a sailing ship at least a century before, possibly while trying to hold off the reef during a storm.

Procedures were gradually improved as the days went on, but the charted area increased with painful slowness. There was no real danger, though the Hunter was constantly beset by very small fish and arthropods. Biochemically his tissues were Earthlike enough to be digestible by Earth organisms, and conversely; it was something of a race every hour he was in the water to see who ate more of whom. Because of the protection of the pipe, the Hunter was able to keep ahead, but he realized how lucky he had been to meet and occupy the shark so soon after his crash beside the island.

For Bob, the days were not going very badly; fate seemed to be holding its fire for the moment. He had not suffered the strange fatigue for nearly two weeks, either because of or in spite of Seever's and the Hunter's combined efforts there was no way to tell. To forestall any complacency, the weariness had been re-placed by the joint pains in more serious form, and, after a few days, by muscle aches and cramps. The cramps were usually in the legs and waist, and some-times he was finding it difficult to conceal them from his fellow workers; they struck suddenly and without warning. Malmstrom, whom he saw at times, made

occasional remarks about his old friend's deteriorated condition but didn't seem to mean them too seriously

so far.

The PFI work had been a nuisance mostly because of the time it demanded. Bob liked it well enough for it's own sake, and even the Hunter was interested. Jenny had suggested that she take the Hunter out during Bob's work hours, accompanied either by her own father or Bob's, but the Hunter had firmly vetoed this. It was bad enough, from the alien's viewpoint, to leave his host for a few hours at a time even when they remained near each other and could rejoin on a few minutes notice. If they were apart by the three or four miles which separated the search area from the refinery, he would not even know if he was needed for perhaps hours.

About the fifth day of actual search-as Seever had predicted, wind permitted their operation much less than half the time, and they had met with no success in borrowing a powered craft-a problem which no one had seriously considered developed, to show that any separation at all of host and symbiont could lead

to trouble.

It was about half an hour before sunset. The Hunter had been rather pitying the boring time his young friends must be having, in contrast to his own, when the situation changed abruptly.

The Hunter was several seconds realizing what had happened. The motions of the boat were always providing some vertical acceleration, and no shock or blow accompanied the parting of the rope. It just quietly let go, and the detector and the Hunter were on their way to the bottom. There was a slight jolt as the wire took the load. This, surprisingly, held, jerking the wooden plug out of the top of the pipe and taking the switch and almost taking some of the alien's tissue with it. By the time he had recovered from this surprise, he and the detector were half buried in slimy mud.

Three and a half fathoms above, consternation reigned. Bob had been holding the rope while Jenny held position with the paddle, but she knew almost as soon as he did what had happened. Small as the loss was, its disappearance had altered the trim of the kayak, and the girl knew her craft very well indeed.

"Did you drop him? Have your muscles quit again?" she asked anxiously.

"No. The rope seems to have broken or come un-tied. If I'd lost my hold we'd still have him; I had it snubbed on a cleat."

"Take the paddle, and hold us here!" the girl snapped. He turned to see that she was already strip-ping down to her bathing suit.

"No! Wait!" he said. "Make sure we know what the position is, first!" He snatched the sextant, made quick readings on the reference tanks, and wrote them down. Then he started to remove his own shirt, remarking as he did so, "We ought to have had some sort of emergency buoy that we could throw over to mark the spot when something like this happens."

"What are you doing? You can't go down!" snapped Jenny. "You're not even as good a swimmer as I am when you're in good health, let alone now."

"And I'm not as good a paddler, and if you do go down and find the other end of the rope somewhere on the bottom, what are the chances of my keeping the upper end in your reach?"

"Do your best. Give me the free end, pay out all the slack you have, and take the paddle." Bob followed instructions, not because he was convinced she was right, but because it seemed a poor time to argue, and Jenny disappeared overboard.

The Hunter could see the canoe, and saw the girl enter the water. Neither view was very encouraging. The kayak had already drifted at least twenty yards from his position, and Jenny, while apparently going as nearly straight down as she could, seemed unlikely to get anywhere near him. Indeed, she did not even reach the bottom; with a fathom still to go, her descent slowed and stopped. She drifted for a moment, evidently trying to see, but her natural buoyancy took over, and after a few seconds she began assisting it.

Her head broke the surface a dozen feet from the kayak. Bob, forgetting for the moment the importance of trying to hold position, paddled over to her while she was getting her breath.

"Any luck?" he asked. She climbed back aboard before answering.

"No. I couldn't quite get to the bottom. We should have goggles; I couldn't see clearly enough to spot the -box and pipe, to say nothing of the rope. The sun will be down soon, too. There isn't a chance of finding himtonight. We'll go in, and you get in touch with people and arrange enough time-swapping at the refinery so you can spend all day tomorrow out here."

"I don't like to leave-"

"I don't either, but it's a case of what we can do, not what we want to do."

"But the Hunter could leave the pipe and swim to the boat, if we wait long enough."

"Fighting off all the small fish and animals he's been telling about? He's too smart to try, I'd think. Could he find us in the dark?"

"I don't suppose so. His eyes aren't too good." "Well, we'll compromise. We'll stay as close to the spot as we can until sunset. If he hasn't shown up by that time-and I still don't think he's dumb enough to try because he'll know we can find the instrument more easily than anything else-we'll go in, and you'll do what I told you."

"All right. What will you do?"

"Go home and report to Dad, make a couple of marker buoys as you were suggesting, and think."

She did not mention that she had already been thinking, and fully intended to do something else.

The Hunter watched the boat hopefully until the light failed, rather wondering why no one dived again and what was going on up above. Jenny was quite right on one point; he did not consider for a moment leaving the shelter of the pipe and trying to swim to the kayak. He waited. When the light faded and he could no longer see the surface, the boat, or anything else but a few luminous life forms, he continued to wait. There seemed nothing else to do but think, and he had to do that anyway.

Jenny and Bob left the kayak at North Beach, the point at the end of Ell's longer arm, where the Hunter had come ashore and found Bob nearly eight years before. Their bicycles were there, since they had been using this as a staging area from the beginning in order to save time, but there was no moon and no easy way of keeping the machines on the road, so they were some time getting even as far as Bob's house. He stayed there very briefly, telling his mother that they were off the water but that he had to get to a telephone, and went on to fulfill the assignment which Jenny had given him.

The girl herself had not stopped. She went on to the Teroa home and asked to see Maeta. The latter turned out to be at the library. Jenny went there, found the other girl downstairs working on new books-Bob's were not the only cratefuls to reach Ell each June-asked her to come outside where they would not be overheard, and told her the whole story.

Maeta had of course been wondering about the things Bob had said in his unguarded moment, but this did not make Jenny's tale any easier to believe.

Jenny was both insistent and persuasive, however, and the older girl eventually agreed to go to the Seever house.

There, the report of the Hunter's loss produced such obviously genuine concern on the part of the doctor, and his wife that Maeta's skepticism weakened. Seever added verbal assurance of the truth of the whole story, with details from the old detective adventure which Jenny had not known. Finally, still with some reservations, Maeta agreed to offer her aquatic skill to help in the recovery of the equipment and, if he existed, of the Hunter. She also agreed to furnish her own outrigger a more stable and capacious craft than the kayak. Since she was not on duty at the library the next day, there would not be the problem of sending a substitute.

When Maeta had left, Seever looked quizzically at his daughter, and asked, "What excuse are you going to make to Bob for this piece of recruiting?"

"If he thinks excuses are needed, his brain really is getting soft. If he doesn't like it, he can just stew. Are you suggesting that you don't like it, either?"

"On the contrary," her father assured her. "It was the smartest thing you could have done. I'm not sure I'd have had the-er-force of personality needed to do it, that's all. Bob is not entirely out of order, feeling the way he does."

Jenny refused to pursue the subject.

"Do we have any good, strong twine here, or will I have to go to the store in the morning?" she asked. "I've got to make some marker buoys."

The Hunter spent a night which would have been fascinating to a marine biologist specializing in Crustacea. He did not come dangerously close to being eaten, as the pipe provided more than enough physical protection, but he himself had to do a certain amount of eating, largely in self-defense. He observed interesting details of structure and physiology in the creatures he digested. It was the relatively coarse features, down to about optical microscope limits, which proved most deserving of attention; at the molecular level the things were essentially the same as Bob and his father and, presumably, the rest of Earth's metazoan life.

A marine biologist might have been annoyed to see a boat coming, but the Hunter was vastly relieved. Even when it was close enough for him to see that it was not the same boat, he had no doubt that it was coming for him. He was very concerned about his host's condition. They now had been apart for nearly fifteen hours. This would have been unimportant a few years ago, but it might very well be crucial by now. He watched anxiously.

He could see the outrigger, and could see that the craft was driven by three paddles. These slowed their motion as it approached; one was withdrawn, and the; canoe came to a near halt ten or twelve yards from -directly overhead. It held position very well for a minute or so. Then something splashed into the water. For a moment the Hunter thought it was a diver; then he realized that it was a rock or a lump of coral. Presumably it was serving as an anchor, though his improvised eye was not good enough to see any line attached to it.

Then a second object splashed through the ripply surface. This one was smaller still, and it took much longer for him to realize that it was simply a buoy, in the form of a short, brightly painted stick connected to another piece of rock by an even thinner cord. Before he had fully worked this out, a third object had entered the water.

This one made much less splash than either of the others. The Hunter was able to recognize a human figure, but not to identify it. This time the diver displayed no difficulty in reaching the bottom, and swam in widening circles for fully half a minute before shooting to the surface for air. At one point, she was close enough to the Hunter to let him see her clearly, and he was pleased to recognize the Teroa girl. He remembered what had been said about her skill in the water, and felt that he was as good as rescued.

On her second dive he was not so sure. She stayed down almost as long, and covered almost as large an area of sea bottom, but she was obviously working away from hislocation.

Presumably she would come back sooner or later, but there was no way of guessing which. There was also so way of guessing Bob's condition, and the Hunter was once again coming as close to panic as his species could.

He wondered how far the girl could see things clearly; he himself could not tell whether she was wearing goggles, though it seemed likely. He hoped so, since human eyes focused so poorly under water. There was nothing he could do about her eyesight, but could he improve the visibility of the tank, or the pipe, or the rope? Failing that, could he do anything to shift the search pattern in his direction?

The lump of coral anchoring the marker buoy was probably movable, but was over ten yards away. Leaving the pipe and traveling to it through the mud would be unpleasant and perhaps risky, but that was irrelevant; the only question was whether he could move the anchor when he got there.

He knew that with this idea formulated, he would' probably not be able to come up with another until he had at least tried it. This was a characteristic he had also noted in human beings. There was nothing to do, therefore, but try it

He had covered three quarters of the distance when another idea did strike him, but by then it seemed better to go on. He finally reached the rock.

It turned out to be one of those annoying in-between things, light enough so that he could lift it, heavy enough to make actual transportation a major project. He spent some time at it, moved it a foot or so, and finally decided that this would take too long. He went back to his pipe and began to implement the second idea.

The hardest part of this was to get the trapped air out of the concrete box, and hold onto it afterward. He could ooze through the space between lid and boy easily enough, though it was supposed to be watertight. Since the gasket had indeed held, the pressure was lower inside, and forcing microscopic bubbles of air against the gradient involved more work-in the literal sense in which the physicist uses the word-than he had counted on. Also, when the volume of gas he had collected began to grow large, he could no longer keep both it and himself inside the pipe. Outside, he had to devote some of his attention to the Hunter-eating zooplankton.

At the same time, he was slowly drawing the broken rope toward himself, until he had the end in reach.

He stopped taking air when the water, which he had had to allow into the box to bring the pressure difference down to something he could handle, came close to the electrical equipment. Wetting this would probably cause even further delay, and the bubble seemed big enough.

Maeta had stopped twice to rest during all this, but was now working far enough away to cause the| Hunter to worry whether even this idea would be good enough. There seemed nothing else to do, however, so when she started down the next time, he released his hold on pipe and box and let his air bubble carry him and the rope upward.

The lifting power of the air proved sufficient for the whole length of the rope, so he came to rest about half way to the surface. The sun was not yet very high-the outrigger had arrived very shortly after sunrise-but the waves were high enough to refract its beams downward at regular and frequent intervals-probably better, the Hunter felt, than uninterrupted light. He kept the walls of his bubble as thin as tactical necessity permitted, and waited. He also wondered whether Bob remembered the item about total internal reflection which they had both read in an elementary physics course.

The flashing reflection from the bubble naturally caught Maeta's eye, though she was more than twenty yards away. She swam over to investigate, since it hadn't been there before and was certainly something unusual. The Hunter saw with satisfaction that she was wearing goggles, and it was obvious that she saw the rope, though what she made of him and his bubble he could not guess. She followed the rope to the bottom, and saw and recognized the equipment.

She returned to the surface for air, then came down again and walked the marker buoy over to the site. While she took her next rest, the Hunter released his air and settled to the bottom; and before the new line was bent he was safely back in his pipe.