be asked, leaving myself open for his monthly temperance
lecture.
"They told me to try getting you," he mentioned. "When's
the last time you sailed?"
"Month and a half ago. The Corning."
"Small stuff," he snorted. "When have you been under,
yourself?"
"It's been awhile."
"It's been over a year, hasn't it? That time you got cut by the
screw, under the Dolphin?"
I turned to him.
"I was in the river last week, up at Angleford where the
currents are strong. I can still get around."
"Sober," he added.
"I'd stay that way," I said, "on a job like this."
A doubting nod.
"Straight union rates. Triple time for extraordinary circum-
stances," he narrated. "Be at Hangar Sixteen with your gear,
Friday morning, five hundred hours. We push off Saturday,
daybreak."
"You're sailing?"
"I'm sailing."
"How come?"
"Money."
"lkky guano."
"The bar isn't doing so well and baby needs new minks."
"I repeat-"
". . . And I want to get away from baby, renew my contact
with basicsfresh air, exercise, make cash . . ."
"All right, sorry I asked."
I poured him a drink, concentrating on HgS04, but it didn't
transmute. Finally I got him soused and went out into the night
to walk and think things over.
Around a dozen serious attempts to land Ichthysaurus
elasmognathus, generally known as "lkky," had been made
over the past five years. When lkky was first sighted, whaling
techniques were employed. These proved either fruitless or
disastrous, and a new procedure was inaugurated. Tensquare
was constructed by a wealthy sportsman named Michael Jandt,
who blew his entire roll on the project.
After a year on the Eastern Ocean, he returned to file
bankruptcy. Cariton Davits, a playboy fishing enthusiast, then
purchased the huge raft and laid a wake for lkky's spawning
grounds. On the nineteenth day out he had a strike and lost one
hundred and fifty bills' worth of untested gear, along with one
ichthysaurus elasmognathus. Twelve days later, using tripled
lines, he hooked, narcotized, and began to hoist the huge
beast. It awakened then, destroyed a control tower, killed six
men, and worked general hell over five square blocks of
Tensquare. Cariton was left with partial hemiplegia and a
