The Atlantic Abomination Read Free

pickup by the throat mikes had got them into the habit of whispering all the time. “Me and Mary were getting along fine!”
    “Don’t give me that!” said Peter, forcing himself to adapt to Luke’s irrepressible manner. “I know they’ve done some investigation into possibilities in free fall, though it’s only theoretical till they start sending up mixed spaceship crews. But here!”
    “What a chance we had for research, anyway!” said Luke.
    Mary cut in impatiently. “Peter, you be serious. Does the process
work
?”
    “A hundred per cent,” Peter confirmed soberly. “I can’t quite believe it, even after going through God knows how many pressure-tank tests and the shallower descents we made before. If they ever get around to giving prizes for oceanography, Ostrovsky and Wong had better share the first even though they aren’t oceanographers. I think they’ve revolutionized our whole damn job.”
    Luke’s whisper cut in. “I’m still damn glad it was you who had to make the first open-water trial, Petey. But I’d like to do the first field-test, so to speak. How close are we to bottom? Or rather, to
side
?”
    “What?”
    “Well, we’re in the East Atlantic Basin, aren’t we? When did you
see
a basin without sides?”
    “Not bad, Luke,” Mary said with a grudging chuckle. “I’ll check.” She pressed a control on the sonar panel, and a pattern of dots like dim stars showed behind a quartz screen.
    “I get eleven hundred yards to the nearest at our level.”
    “Right. Let’s paddle over. I want to go and grub about a bit, shift some ooze and pick up a few samples of fauna if I can spot any.”
    “Well—” Mary seemed hesitant, and Peter spoke up.
    “I think it’s an excellent idea.”
    Mary nodded, and began to let water into the reactor pile.
    “Steady! Right, that’s it. I’ve just got the mountain wall in the light from the beacon.” Luke was hanging on the hull of the ’nef beside the lock, peering forward into the green gloom. “I don’t think I’ll need a handlight when you’re so close, but I’ll take it along in case I want to get to the bottom of the ooze.”
    There was silence. Peter shifted in his cramped space, and stared at Mary, thinking about the more-than-equality, the indistinguishability, which the technological wonders surroundingthem had imposed on the sexes. The throat mikes took the richness out of Mary’s voice; the suit took it from her shapely figure. He could catch only glimpses of her face behind her helmet. She had large expressive eyes, flat and almost Oriental cheekbones, a full soft-looking mouth. She was freckled in all shades of brown from near-orange to near-black, and her hair was a lustrous light brown. Amazing.
    He made sure that his mike was set for in-ship calling only. “Mary, can I ask you a personal question?”
    The helmet turned toward him. He thought a smile twitched at her mouth, but it was hard to be sure. “Just one. As a reward.”
    “Reward? For what?” Peter was as puzzled as he sounded.
    “For being the first to go out. The fact that I got into oceanography at all was due to hero-worship. So I suppose when I run across a small case of heroism I suffer an attack of renewed adolescence.” The second sentence seemed to embarrass her, and to be added in mitigation of her remark about a reward in spite of that.
    “Well, I’ll be—As a matter of fact, that half answers my personal question. Mary, you’re a very attractive girl, you know. What in hell are you doing here, instead of being back home having dinner with prosperous boy friends?”
    There was a long pause. “All right, I’ll tell you,” she said. She began to giggle. “I warn you, you’ll think it’s very silly.
    “It goes way back to when I was fourteen and in school. I had a crush on an older boy. He must have been about seventeen. I tried to throw myself at him. And boy, did he know how to duck! Why not? I was a kid. He was nearly a man.
    “Only,