"Yes, sir."
The seaman went away. Norman stood and shouted, "Yahoo! We're saved!"
"At least he wasn't an illusion," Norman said, staring at the screen. "There he is, big as life, on the monitor."
"Yes. There he is. But where'd he go?" Beth said. For the last hour, they had searched the habitat thoroughly. There was no sign of the black crewman. There was no sign of a submarine outside. There was no evidence of surface ships. The balloon they had sent up registered eighty-knot winds and thirty-foot waves before the wire snapped.
So where had he come from? And where had he gone? Fletcher was working the consoles. A screen of data came up. "How about this? Log of ships in active service shows no vessel currently designated Sea Hornet."
Norman said, "What the hell is going on here?"
"Maybe he was an illusion," Ted said.
"Illusions don't register on videotape," Harry said. "Besides, I saw him, too."
"You did?" Norman said.
"Yeah. I had just woken up, and I had had this dream about being rescued, and I was lying in bed when I heard footsteps and he walked into the room."
"Did you talk to him?"
"Yes. But he was funny. He was dull. Kind of boring."
Norman nodded. "You could tell something wasn't right about him."
"Yes, you could."
"But where did he come from?" Beth said.
"I can think of only one possibility," Ted said. "He came from the sphere. Or at least, he was made by the sphere. By Jerry."
"Why would Jerry do that? To spy on us?"
Ted shook his head. "I've been thinking about this," he said. "It seems to me that Jerry has the ability to create things. Animals. I don't think that Jerry is a giant squid, but Jerry created the giant squid that attacked us. I don't think Jerry wants to attack us, but, from what Beth was telling us, once he made the squid, then the squid might attack the habitat, thinking the cylinders were its mortal enemy, the whale. So the attack happened as a kind of accident of creation."
They frowned, listening. To Norman, the explanation was entirely too convenient. "I think there is another possibility. That Jerry is hostile."
"I don't believe that," Ted said. "I don't believe Jerry is hostile."
"He certainly acts hostile, Ted."
"But I don't think he intends to be hostile."
"Whatever he intends," Fletcher said, "we better not go through another attack. Because the structure can't take it. And neither can the support systems.
"After the first attack, I had to increase positive pressure," Fletcher said, "in order to fix the leaks. To keep water from coming in, I had to increase the pressure of the air inside the habitat to make it greater than the pressure of the water outside. That stopped the leaks, but it meant that air bubbled out through all the cracks. And one hour of repair work consumed nearly sixteen hours of our reserve air. I've been worried we'll run out of air."
There was a pause. They all considered the implications of that.
"To compensate," Fletcher said, "I've dropped the internal pressure by three centimeters' pressure. We're slightly negative right now, and we should be fine. Our air will last us. But another attack under these conditions and we'll crush like a beer can."
Norman didn't like hearing any of this, but at the same time he was impressed with Fletcher's competence. She was a resource they ought to be using, he thought. "Do you have any suggestions, Teeny, if there's another attack?"
"Well, we have something in Cyl B called HVDS."
"Which is?"
"High Voltage Defense System. There's a little box in B that electrifies the metal walls of the cylinders at all times, to prevent electrolytic corrosion. Very slight electrical charge, you aren't really aware of it. Anyway, there's another, green box attached to that one, and it's the HVDS. It's basically a low-amp stepup transformer that sends two million volts over the cylinder surface. Should be very unpleasant for any animal."
"Why didn't we use it before?" Beth said. "Why didn't Barnes use it, instead of risking - "
" - Because the Green Box has problems," Fletcher said. "For one thing, it's really sort of theoretical. As far as I know, it's never actually been used in a real undersea work situation."
"Yes, but it must have been tested."
"Yes. And in all the tests, it started fires inside the habitat."
Another pause, while they considered that. Finally Norman said, "Bad fires?"
"The fires tend to burn the insulation, the wall padding."
"The fires take the padding off!"
"We'd die of heat loss in a few minutes."
Beth said, "How bad can a fire be? Fires need oxygen to burn, and we've only got two percent oxygen down here."
"That's true, Dr. Halpern," Fletcher said, "but the actual oxygen percentage varies. The habitat is made to deliver pulses as high as sixteen percent for brief periods, four times an hour. It's all automatically controlled; you can't override it. And if the oxygen percentage is high, then fires burn just fine - three times faster than topside. They easily go out of control."
Norman looked around the cylinder. He spotted three fire extinguishers mounted on the walls. Now that he thought about it, there were extinguishers all over the habitat. He'd just never really paid attention before.
"Even if we get the fires under control, they're hell on the systems," Fletcher said. "The air handlers aren't made to take the added monoxide by-products and soot."