Space Lash

except where the intake ring broke the curve some forty centimeters back of the nose. The exhaust ports, about equally far from the tail end, were less visible since they were merely openings in the dark gray skin. Integument and openings alike were hard to see in detail, however; the entire organism was overgrown with a brownish, slimy-looking mass of filaments reminiscent both of mold and of sealskin.

“It's picked up something, all right,” Mancini conceded. “I don't see why your magnets shouldn't work, though… unless you'd rather they didn't get dirty.”

“All right. Get down the ladder and steer 'em, Rick.” Dandridge caused a light alloy ladder to extend from the bow edge of the hatch as he spoke; then he fingered another switch which sent the grapples themselves slowly downward. Stubbs easily beat them to the foot of the ladder, hooked one leg through a rung, reached out with both arms and tried to steady the descending mass of metal. The Shark was pitching somewhat in the swell, and the eighty pounds of electromagnet and associated wiring was slightly rebellious. The youngest of the crew and the only nonspecialist among its members — he was still working off the two-year labor draft requirement which preceded higher education — Rick Stubbs got at least his share of the dirty work. He was not so young as to complain about it.

“Slower…slower…twenty c's to go…ten…hold it now… just a touch lower all right, juice!” Dandridge followed the instructions, fed current to the magnets, and started to lift,

“Wait!” the boy on the ladder called almost instantly. “It's not holding!”

The mechanic reacted almost as fast.

“Bring it up anyway!” he called. “The infection is sticking to the magnets. Let me get a sample!” Stubbs shrank back against the ladder as the slimy mass rose past him. In response to Mancini's command. Dandridge grimaced with distaste as it came above deck level and into his view.

“You can have it!” he remarked, not very originally.

Mancini gave no answer, and showed no sign of any emotion but interest. He had slipped back into his lab as the material was ascending, and now returned with a two-liter flask and the biggest funnel he possessed.

“Run it aft a little,” he said briefly. “That's enough…I'll miss some, and it might as well fall into the water as onto the deck.” The grapple, which had crawled a few inches toward him on its overhead rail, stopped just short of the after edge of the hatch. Mancini, standing unconcernedly at the edge of the opening with the wind ruffling his clothes, held funnel and flask under the magnets.

“All right, Gil, drop it,” he ordered. Dandridge obeyed.

Most of the mess fell obediently away from the grapple. Some landed in the funnel and proceeded to ooze down into the flask; some hit Mancini's extended arm without appearing to bother him; a little dropped onto the deck, to the winchman's visible disgust. Most fell past Stubbs back into the sea.

The mechanic took up some of the material from his arm and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. “Gritty,” he remarked. “And the magnets held this stuff, but not the whale's skeleton. That means that most of the skeleton must be gone, and I bet this grit is magnetite. I'll risk a dollar that this infection comes from that old 775 -Fe-DE6 culture that got loose a few years ago from Passamaquoddy. I'll give it the works to make sure, though. You divers will have to use slings to get the fish aboard, I'm afraid.”

“Rick, I'll send the magnets down first and you can rinse 'em off a bit in the water. Then I'll run out the sling and you can get it around the whale.”

“All right, sir. Standing by.” As the grapple went down again Dandridge called to the mechanic, who had turned back toward the lab.

“I suppose the whale is ruined, if you're right about the infection. Can we collect damages?” Mancini shook his head negatively.

“No one could collect from DE: they went broke years ago — from paying damages. Besides, the courts decided years ago that injury or destruction of a piece of pseudolife was recoverable property damage only if an original model was involved. This fish is a descendant of a model ten years old; it was born at sea. We didn't make it and can't recover for it.” He turned to his bench, but flung a last thought over his shoulder. “My guess that this pest is a DE escapee could be wrong, too. They worked out a virus for that strain a few months after it escaped, and I haven't heard of an iron infection in four years. This may be a mutation of it — that's still my best guess — but it could also be something entirely new.” He settled himself onto a stool and began dividing the material from the flask into the dozens of tiny containers which fed the analyzers.

In the water below, Stubbs had plunged from the ladder and was removing slime from the grapple magnets. The stuff was not too sticky, and the grit which might be magnetite slightly offset the feeling of revulsion which the boy normally had for slimy materials, so he was able to finish the job quickly enough to keep Dandridge happy. At Rick's call, the grapple was retracted; a few moments later the hoist cable came down again with an ordinary sling at its extremity. Stubbs was still in the water, and Farrell had come part way down the ladder. The chief diver guided the cable down to his young assistant, who began working the straps around the torpedo-like form which still bobbed between the Shark's hulls.

It was quite a job. The zeowhale was still slippery, since the magnets had not come even close to removing all the foreign growth. When the boy tried to reach around it to fasten the straps it slithered away from him. He called for more slack and tried to pin it against one of the hulls as he worked, but still it escaped him. He was too stubborn to ask for help, and by this time Farrell was laughing too hard to have provided much anyway.

“Ride him, Buster!” the chief diver called as Stubbs finally managed to scissor the slippery cylinder with his legs. “That's it…you've got him dogged now!”

The boy hadn't quite finished, actually, but one strap did seem secure around the forward part of the hull. “Take up slack!” he called up to the hatch, without answering Farrell's remark.

Dandridge had been looking through the trap and could see what was needed; he reached to his control console and the hoist cable tightened.

“That's enough!” called Stubbs as the nose of the zeowhale began to lift from the water. “Hold it until I get another strap on, or this one will slip free!”

Winches obediently ceased purring. With its motion restrained somewhat, the little machine offered less opposition to the attachment of a second band near its stern. The young swimmer called, somewhat breathlessly, “Take it up!” and paddled himself slowly back to the ladder. Farrell gave him a hand up, and they reached the deck almost as quickly as the specimen.

Dandridge closed the hatch without waiting for orders, though he left the ladder down — there would be other pickups in the next few minutes, but the wind was cold and loud. Stubbs paid no attention; he barely heard the soft “Eight hundred meters, seventy-five mils to starboard,” as he made his way around the closing hatch to Mancini's work station. The mechanic's job was much more fascinating than the pilot's.

He knew better than to interrupt a busy professional with questions, but the mechanic didn't need any. Like several other men, not only on the Shark but among the crew of her mother ship, Mancini had come to like the youngster and respect his general competence; and like most professionals, his attitude toward an intelligent labor draftee was a desire to recruit him before someone else did. The man, therefore, began to talk as soon as he noticed the boys presence.

“You know much about either chemical or field analysis, Rick?”

“A little. I can recognize most of your gear — ultracentrifuge, chromatographic and electrophoretic stuff, NMR equipment, and so on. Is that,” he pointed to a cylindrical machine on another bench, “a diffraction camera?”

“Good guess. It's a hybrid that a friend of mine dreamed up which can be used either for electron microphotography or diffraction work. All that comes a bit later, though. One thing about analysis hasn't changed since the beginning; you try to get your initial sample into as many different homogeneous parts as possible before you get down to the molecular scale.”

“So each of these little tubes you're filling goes through centrifuge, or solvation, or electrophoresis…'

“More usually, through all of them, in different orders.”

“I should think that just looking at the original, undamaged specimen would tell you something. Don't you ever do that?”

“Sure. The good old light microscope will never disappear; as you imply, it's helpful to see a machine in its assembled state, too. I'll have some slides in a few more seconds; the mike is in that cabinet. Slide it out, will you?”

Stubbs obeyed, literally since the instrument was mounted on a track. The designers of the