rates. I couldn't rent that damned thing myself. And I want in."
Erase. Dub something else. Fadeout as he moves toward
hopper, etcetera.
"Cheese," I said, or something like that, and took a walk
around Tensquare, by myself.
I mounted each Rook, checking out the controls and the
underwater video eyes. Then I raised the main lift.
Malvern had no objections to my testing things this way. In
fact, he encouraged it. We had sailed together before and our
positions had even been reversed once upon a time. So I wasn't
surprised when I stepped off the lift into the Hopkins Locker
and found him waiting. For the next ten minutes we inspected
the big room in silence, walking through its copper coil
chambers soon to be Arctic.
Finally, he slapped a wall.
"Well, will we fill it?"
I shook my head.
"I'd like to, but I doubt it. I don't give two hoots and a damn
who gets credit for the catch, so long as I have a part in it. But it
won't happen. That gal's an egomaniac. She'll want to operate
the Slider, and she can't."
"You ever meet her?"
"Yeah."
"How long ago?"
"Four, five years."
"She was a kid then. How do you know what she can do
now?"
"I know. She'll have learned every switch and reading by this
time. She'll be up on all the theory. But do you remember one
time we were together in the starboard Rook, forward, when
lkky broke, water like a porpoise?"
"How could I forget?"
"Well?"
He rubbed his emery chin.
"Maybe she can do it, Carl. She's raced torch ships and she's
scubaed in bad waters back home." He glanced in the direction
of invisible Hand. "And she's hunted in the Highlands. She
might be wild enough to pull that horror into her lap without
flinching.
". . . For Johns Hopkins to foot the bill and shell out seven
figures for the corpus," he added. "That's money, even to a
Luharich."
I ducked through a hatchway.
"Maybe you're right, but she was a rich witch when I knew
her.
"And she wasn't blonde," I added, meanly.
He yawned.
"Let's find breakfast."
We did that.
When I was young I thought that being born a sea creature
