This dolphin was much larger than the little spinners the fleet had been killing only hours ago. It must be one of the big, brainy breeds. Certainly it looked amused by this satiric turnabout.
Damn, Crat cursed inwardly as his right arm came free at last. No dumpit privacy anywhere. Not even when I’m dying.
Accompanying that resentment came a dissolving of the peaceful, time-stretched resignation. With a crash, his will to live suddenly returned. Panic threatened as his diaphragm clenched, causing a few bubbles to escape. He must have been underwater only a minute or two, but abruptly his lungs were in agony.
Ironically, it was the dolphin — the fact of having an audience — that made Crat hold on. Damn if he’d give it the same show as the others! Now that his mind was working again — such as it was — Crat began recalling important things.
Like the fact that he had a knife! Sheathed at his ankle, it was one of the few items ship rules wouldn’t let you hock. Bending, grabbing, unfolding, Crat came up with the gleaming blade and started sawing at the strands clasping his legs.
Funny thing about the way water carried sound — it seemed to amplify his heartbeat, returning multiple echoes from all sides. Counterpoint seemed to come from the spectator, his dolphin voyeur… though Crat avoided looking at the creature as he worked.
One leg free! Crat dodged a loop of netting sent his way by the rolling currents — and in the process almost lost the knife. Clutching it convulsively, he also squeezed out more stale, precious air.
His fingers were numb sausages as he resumed sawing. The sea began filling with speckles as each second passed. Infinite schools of blobby purple fishes encroached across his failing vision, heralding unconsciousness. They began to blur and the feeling spread throughout his limbs as his body began quaking. Any second now it would overcome his will with a spasmodic drive to inhale.
The last coil parted! Crat tried to launch himself toward the surface, but all his remaining strength had to go into not breathing.
An assist from a surprising quarter saved him… a push from below that sent him soaring upward, breaching the surface with a shuddering gasp. Somehow, he floundered over a cluster of float buoys, keeping his mouth barely above water as he sucked sweet air. I’m alive, he realized in amazement. I’m alive.
The roaring in his ears masked the clamor of men watching from the Congo, only now beginning to rush to the rescue. Dimly, Crat knew that even those now bravely diving into the water would never be able to cross the jumbled net in time to reach some still-thrashing forms nearby.
As soon as his arms and legs would move again, Crat blearily turned to the nearest struggling survivor, a stricken sailor only a couple of meters away, churning the water feebly, desperately. The fellow was thoroughly trapped, his head bobbing intermittently just at the surface. As Crat neared, he spewed and coughed and managed to catch a thin whistle of breath before being dragged under again.
Belatedly, Crat realized his knife was gone for good, probably even now tumbling down to Davy Jones’s lost and found. So he did the only thing he could. Gathering a cluster of float buoys under one arm, he stretched across the intervening tangle to grab the dying man’s hair, hauling him up for a sobbing gasp of air. Each following breath came as a shrill whistle then… until the poor sod’s eyes cleared enough of threatening coma to fill instead with hysteria. Good thing the victim’s arms were still caught then, or in panic he’d have clawed Crat into the trap as well.
Crat’s own breathing came in shuddering sobs as he kicked in reserves he never knew he had before. Just keeping his own head above the lapping water was hard enough. He also had to tune out the fading splashes of other dying men nearby. I can’t help ’em. Really can’t… Got my hands full.
Nearby, Crat felt another form approach to look at him. That dolphin again. I wish someone’d shoot the damned…
Then he recalled that shove to the seat of his pants. The push that had saved his life.
His mind was too slow, too blurry to think of anything much beyond that. Certainly he formed no clear idea to thank the one responsible. But that eye seemed to sense something — his realization perhaps. Again it winked at him. Then the dolphin lifted its head, chattered quickly, and vanished.
Crat was still blinking at strange, unexpected thoughts when rescuers arrived at last to relieve him of his burden and haul his exhausted carcass out of the blood-warm sea.
A new type of pollution was first noticed way back in the nine-teen-seventies. Given the priorities of those times, it didn’t get as much attention as, say, tainted rivers or the choking stench over major cities. Nevertheless, a vocal opposition began to rise up in protest.
Trees. In certain places trees were decried as the latest symbols of human greed and villainy against nature.
“Oh, certainly trees are good things in general,” those voices proclaimed. “Each makes up a miniature ecosystem, sheltering and supporting a myriad of living things. Their roots hold down and aerate topsoil. They draw carbon from the air and give back sweet oxygen. From their breathing leaves transpires moisture, so one patch of forest passes on to the next each rainstorm’s bounty.”
Food, pulp, beauty, diversity… there was no counting the array of treasures lost in those tropical lands where hardwood forests fell daily in the hundreds, thousands of acres. And yet, take North America in 1990, where there actually were more trees than had stood a century before — many planted by law to replace ancient “harvested” stands of oak and beech and redwood. Or take Britain, where meadows once cropped close by herds of grazing sheep were now planted — under generous tax incentives — with hectare after hectare of specially bred pine.
Trash forests, they were called by some. Endless stands of uniformity, stretching in geometric lattice rows as far as the eye could see. Absolutely uniform, they had been gene spliced for quick growth. And grow they did.
“But these forests are dead zones,” said the complainers. “A floor covered with only pine needles or bitter eucalyptus leaves shelters few deer, feeds few otters, hears the songs of hardly any birds.”
Even much later, as the Great Campaign for the Trillion Trees got under way — losing in some places, but elsewhere helping hold fast against the spreading deserts — many new forests were still silent places. An emptiness seemed to whisper, echoing among the still branches.
It’s not the same, said this troubled quiet. Some things, once gone, cannot be easily restored.
• MESOSPHERE
The most pleasant thing about the new routine was that it finally gave Stan Goldman a chance to take some time off and go argue with old friends. The next several Gazer runs would be ordinary.
The program was on schedule, slowly nudging Beta, beat by beat, into its higher orbit. At last Stan felt he could leave his assistant in charge of the resonator and take an hour or so off to relax.
In fact, it was really part of his job — helping maintain their cover. After all, wouldn’t their hosts get suspicious if he didn’t stay in character? The paleontologists at the Hammer site would find it odd if old Stan Goldman didn’t come by on occasion to talk and kibitz. So it was with a relatively clear conscience that he made for the nearby encampment to partake of some beer and friendly conversation.
All in the line of duty of course.
“We ought to have an answer in a few years,” said Wyn Nielsen, the tall, blond director of the dig and an old friend of many years. “We’ll know when the Han finally launch that big interferometer of theirs. Until then talk is pointless.”