Fish Tank

by Gregory Bennett

Illustration by David Hardy

A few other colonists were out for an early evening stroll along the main promenade of Rantoul High Colony’s northern end cap. Jeanette dodged around them, only vaguely mindful of their inquisitive stares. She tried to push her jog into a dead run, but her body refused. Her legs began to ache, reminding her this was only her second day back in the space colony’s gravity field after five weeks of servicing zero-g laboratories in Earth orbit. Her medical regimen called for eight weeks reconditioning in full acceleration after the tour, but this was an emergency! If she hurried, she could catch an immediate launch window for OceanLab.

Her immediate goal was to get to Central Station as quickly as she could. It was nearly twenty kilometers down the giant cylinder of the Rantoul space colony, but fortunately she would not have to run the entire distance.

Without breaking her stride, she unclipped her phone from her belt and slipped the instrument over her ear. A stitch of pain lanced her right side when she reached up to tap out a comm code on her phone. Her right leg jerked spasmodically in response, and she stumbled into a cart laden with bouquets of fresh flowers.

I’m really out of shape! Jeanette admonished herself. Gotta keep up my exercises while I’m on tour. Muttering apologies to the flower vendor she resumed her jog, deliberately pumping with both arms as she ran.

“Beverly Holmes,” the familiar voice spoke from the phone in her ear. “Jeanette? Where are you? I’ve been waiting at Maxi’s for ten minutes already.” Beverly was always irritated when Jeanette was late for a date. In return, Beverly’s obsession with punctuality irritated her; she had enough of clock-watching while astrogating between the laboratories.

“I’m almost to the tram station, on my way to the docks,” she huffed. Geez! Only two hundred yards and I’m already winded!

“What? I can’t hear you!”

Jeanette reached up to adjust her boom mike. The stitch returned. “I’m on my way to the docks, Bev. Have to cancel our dinner date. Gotta go back out!”

“You can’t go out! You just got back to colony two days ago!”

“Don’t give me… any of your… physical therapy crap, Bev.” She had to gasp for breath between each word. She slowed to a brisk walk, feeling her pulse pounding in her fingertips. “I’m fine… it’s just a short trip. Have to go!” She paused to suck a few heavy draughts of air, hoping Beverly would not realize just how winded she was.

“What’s the rush?”

“OceanLab is leaking pressure.” The pain in her side threatened to double her over. She tried to ignore it. The best she could manage was a stilt-legged walk, but at least she was making progress. “Lots of hits. Meteorites or something.”

“Let ’em send someone else. You’re not ready.”

The doors from the North Cap complex swung open ahead of her. Again picking up her pace to a jog, Jeanette hurried into the twilight outside. She fought down a tinge of nausea, reminding herself she was really inside a spacecraft. Agoraphobia; it always nagged her after she returned from weeks in the safe confines of her spacesuit and her tiny laboratories. She looked up toward the comforting vision of the other two land strips of Rantoul High Colony. Lights were beginning to twinkle on as the colony rotated its solar mirrors into their night cycle. She got her bearings as she watched Chanute, Rantoul’s companion cylinder, move sedately across the immense window directly above her.

“I don’t see how people can stand to live on Earth, with nothing but empty air between them and oblivion,” she said.

“We weren’t discussing your phobias, Jeanette,” Beverly reminded her. “We were talking about the nutty idea of you going back out after only two days of reconditioning. Now just forget it. Send someone else.”

“It’s gotta be me,” she explained. “Nobody else knows OceanLab. I’m the only tech who’s ever been inside, and I’m the only one who knows the fish! Besides, I have an exclusive maintenance contract with the Seattle Aquarium!”

A short jog down the foot path brought her to the brightly lit tram station. There were no cars in the station, and no one waiting. This early in the evening the trams would be shuttling empty back down the cylinder to bring more Toulies to the amusements and night clubs of North Cap. Feeling grateful for the solitude, she collapsed onto a seat, and for a moment was aware of little beyond her heaving chest. She had to wipe sweat from her eyes so she could find the buttons on the call panel. With a leaden hand she reached up to punch for a tram.

“Jeanette? You still there?”

“Yeah. Sorry. I was doing something.”

“Why are you so eager to get to OceanLab? I thought fish gave you the creeps.”

“Not at all!” Jeanette countered. “They’re beautiful! At least as long as I don’t have to touch them. Besides, Bev, Oscar is on OceanLab! He might be hurt!”

A tram whooshed into the station, braking silently to a sudden stop.

“Oscar?”

“I told you about Oscar. The octopus. He’s the most important experiment at OceanLab.” She had to use both hands to drag herself out of her seat to board the tram. In the safe confines of the enclosed cabin, she found she could finally relax and catch her breath.

“Oh yeah,” Beverly said. “You told me you had a pet octopus on OceanLab you liked to talk to.”

“Oscar is more than a pet! He’s… he’s Oscar!”

“Jeanette, you are singularly weird.” There was a wry smirk in Beverly’s voice.

“Thanks, Bev. I love you, too. Gotta ring off now. Water my spider plant for me, will you?”

“Always do. Have a good flight!” Beverly always wished her a good flight, but this time she didn’t sound very sincere.

Jeanette punched for Central Station on the tram’s control map and tried to relax as the vehicle glided out of the station. Unless the tram had to pick up someone else, she would be there in fifteen minutes. Just out of North Cap, the tram was still accelerating through the northern groves. She inhaled deeply. The sweet fragrance of orange trees reminded her of all she missed while she was out on tour. After weeks of zero-g stuffiness, it was good to have her sense of smell back, if only for a single day. But her responsibility to her customers nagged her; she made another call.

“Yah. Leroy’s Services.” It was Duke, Leroy’s protege. He sounded distracted. Jeanette heard the snickety rasp of a ratchet wrench in the background. The ratcheting suddenly stopped. “Oh, hi Jeanette! Just recognized your comm code.”

“Evening, Duke. Hey, is my suit ready?”

“Sure, back in your locker. I got the pads in your long johns done this afternoon. C’mon in and try ’em on any time.”

“I’m on my way there now, Duke,” Jeanette said.

He was just a little too long in responding. She wondered what he was thinking. She knew he was fond of her, but tried not to take advantage of it. Duke was a sweet kid, passionately interested in anything she told him about her adventures in the zero-g labs. And unabashedly interested in her. It would be too easy to hurt him.

“Tonight?” he finally asked. “But I thought you were going out with Beverly tonight.”

“It’s sweet of you to remember, Duke. Beverly and I did have plans, but I have to go back out.”

There was no hesitation this time. “You can’t go out! You just got back!”

Oh great. Here we go again. “Don’t worry, Duke. I got lots of exercise on my last tour, hardly any deconditioning at all.” It bothered her to lie to him, but if he were seriously worried about her, he might not let her have her suit back. “And I have to go. OceanLab got hit; it’s leaking fast. I have to get down there and repair the damage before all the fish die.”

“OceanLab?” Excitement tinged his voice. “Is Oscar all right?”

Jeanette smiled to herself. Duke had never seen a live octopus, but he loved stories about Oscar.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “The control center in Seattle lost all video when the collision occurred. They’re only getting environmental status on the backup S-band. He should be OK so far, though; the lab is leaking, but it still has pressure.”

“How long ’til you get here?”

“Just a few minutes. I’m already on the tram.”

“I’ll have your suit ready. I’m recharging the oxygen tanks now.”

Jeanette followed the mixed scent of oily silicone grease and pungent disinfectants through the catacombs of Leroy’s Services. Duke’s boss could fix almost anything that flew in Earth orbit, working in a maze of rooms partitioned out of the structure next to Central Station’s airlocks. Her locker was one of dozens lining the robing room next to Duke’s workshop.

True to his word, Duke had already set up Jeanette’s space suit in the donning rack. Her long underwear, really a body suit interwoven with cooling and ventilation tubes, lay on his workbench. Bulky padding sewn into the garment adapted her personal topography to the interior of her secondhand space suit so she wouldn’t bang around inside. She caught him with his back to her, adjusting the long johns just so. He was proud of his work, and was obviously hoping to impress her. It worked; she was impressed.

“It looks wonderful!”

Duke jumped, startled. He turned and grinned at her. “Thanks, Jeanette. Everything’s ready to go. Need help?”

She really didn’t need help—the donning rack was efficiently designed to aid an astronaut even in the full gravity field—but she knew he would feel rewarded if she let him help her.

“Thank you for offering, Duke,” she said, answering his grin. She pulled the robing room door closed behind her and kicked off her shoes. “You know how difficult it is to handle the suit in full g, and I’m in a hurry.” She peeled off her sweater and hesitated just long enough to see Duke flush a charming shade of crimson before turning her back to him.

“Unhook my bra for me?” she requested sweetly. She knew she was teasing him, but the boy deserved some compensation for his interest in her. Besides, she rationalized to herself, she was wearing a long-line iron maiden of a bra, specially designed to help support her back until she got reconditioned. She could undo the hooks herself, but it was a trial.

Duke didn’t hesitate to reach for the fasteners, but she could feel the nervous shaking of his fingers transmitted through the bra as he worked. She was surprised that despite his nervousness he worked quickly and efficiently, demonstrating more familiarity with bra hooks than she would have expected. She looked over her shoulder and smiled.

“Do you do this for your girlfriend?”

“Big sister,” he stammered. His fingers suddenly seemed to become entangled with the last hook, but he got it undone. “But, uh, she’s not built like you, Jeanette.”

She wasn’t sure why, but it was reassuring to hear that Duke didn’t have a girlfriend. Holding the bra loosely in front of her, she turned back toward him and kissed his cheek. “Why thank you, Duke! I didn’t realize you’d noticed!”

“I notice; I notice,” he muttered.

“Good! Now turn around. Get my long johns for me?”

While his back was turned, she quickly dropped the bra and slipped off her panties along with her shorts. Duke held her undersuit out behind him. For a brief moment she regretted that teasing was as far as she ever went, but the vision of the solitude she would have once she was out in space again overwhelmed the thought. Solitude, far from the crowded space colony, away from the inscrutable wants and needs of others; she was eager to regain it.

With painstaking attention to each detail, she laced herself into the undergarment. This part of the donning process couldn’t be hurried. An overlooked maladjustment would later turn into a chafing point which would plague her for hours in transit to the laboratory.

“OK, you can look now,” she said as she pulled the final laces closed.

He looked. Padded out to conform to the interior contours of her space suit, she showed considerably less feminine curvature, but he didn’t seem to mind. His eyes scanned as if he were mentally erasing her bulky long johns. Her ambivalence returned; he was almost an adult now, only three years younger than her. She should stop thinking of him as the kid who used to follow her around in school. This was adult stuff, and the more she thought about it, the more she wanted to get away from it.

With Duke’s help, she stuffed herself into her suit. Torso first, then pants, boots, and gloves. She carried her helmet while he rolled a cart containing her backpack to the airlock.

“Will you take care of my clothes, Duke?” she requested.

“Sure. Aren’t you taking anything else with you on this trip? No baggage?”

“Don’t have time to pack. It’s just a few hours to OceanLab, and I have food there, in the safe-haven supplies.”

He stared over her shoulder for a moment, eyes unfocused, brows knitted in worry. When he didn’t say anything more, she moved toward the airlock. Finally, he blurted out, “When are you going to get a new scooter, Jeanette? I worry about you, going out in that bucket of bolts.”

“Three more tours.” She paused at the airlock’s inner door. “Then I’ll have enough saved up to buy a brand-new Harley; but I might just wait until I can afford a pressurized cabin, too.” In her suit, she was just a bit taller than Duke. She leaned down and kissed him, and was rewarded by a disarming look of surprise. He was obviously delighted. “If I get a pressure cab, maybe I can take you with me on tour some time,” she cooed.

Duke’s eyes widened. “Would you? I’d really like that!”

“Some day, I promise! But first I’d better get out there and protect my job, or there won’t be any income to make it happen!”

“But you have lots of labs to take care of. OceanLab is just one—”

“Uh huh,” she agreed. “But OceanLab pays the most, and it’s the most important. I’ve told you about the research they’re doing in Seattle.”

“Yeah, right.” Duke didn’t hesitate. She wondered if he ever thought of anything but her projects. That she might have so much influence over another person’s life both flattered and frightened her. “Zero-g deconditioning studies. Besides the fish studies, they’re investigating why humans lose their ability to process fatty acids in a weightless environment, and why mollusks don’t. That’s why Oscar is so important.”

“You got it. That octopus was born in zero g, yet he’s perfectly normal. He’s even fathered some children now. Hmm, what do you call a baby octopus?”

“Octopups?” Duke suggested.

“Octopuppies! I like it! The second generation of cephalopods bom without gravity, and they’re all doing fine. Fortunately, Oscar doesn’t seem to mind when I have to extract one of them for dissection.”

“He doesn’t like his children?”

“I’m not sure he realizes they’re his own children,” Jeanette said. “And there are so many of the little critters—hundreds—I don’t think an octopus could get into family values. He just ignores the octopuppies, pays more attention to other animals. There’s this one big grouper he seems to be friendly with, and he really likes the lobsters. Of course, he likes to eat lobsters, so that make sense. Actually, Oscar gets along pretty well with all the other animals in the aquarium, all but the jellyfish. He can’t stand jellyfish; he’s always stuffing them into the snailbots.”

“Huh? What’s a snailbot?”

“Little robot scavengers that float around in the tanks and clean up the water. It’s one of the few concessions we had to make to adapt a salt-water aquarium to zero g. We tried live scavengers, but they’re all adapted to cleaning up the detritus from the bottom, or from rocks. In OceanLab, the gunk doesn’t filter out, so we use a machine to keep the water nice and tidy.”

“Maybe OceanLab will get an Earth scavenger to adapt?”

“Could be, but the bots are working well so far. Snailbots to clean up, lungbots to aerate the water. Except for one general-purpose robot with lots of little manipulators, those are the only machines I need to keep everything going smoothly.” She thought of how much time she was investing in this friendly chat and glanced at her watch. “Until now, that is. I’d better get going. Eleven minutes to launch.” She surprised Duke, and herself, by kissing him again before she donned her helmet and stepped into the airlock.

Midway Marina was a lacework of catwalks suspended below Rantoul High Colony’s exterior shell. The Sun had just set when she emerged from the airlock, but it would be back again in one minute as the colony completed half of its lethargic rotation. She was happy to see that Rantoul Departure Control had already switched on the marina lights for her. An armada of space ships, everything from little unpressurized scooters to large family-sized yachts, hung suspended from the network of overhead rails.

She carefully made her way along the open metal grid to her own scooter, towing her backpack behind her in its little cart. Gravity wasn’t noticeably higher down in the marina, just a few hundredths of a g above normal, but her heavy suit reminded her just how out of shape she was. She was exhausted by the time she had her backpack installed in its cradle in her scooter.

Duke was right; she really needed a new scooter. The vehicle she rode on every tour was more hope and promise than engineering elegance. The whole contraption was made up of second-hand parts never intended to serve their current function. Still, she was proud of it; except for a little help from Leroy and Duke, she’d done all the work herself.

With painstaking, deliberate care, she climbed down into her cabin. Production-model space freighters had elegant command centers, but her cabin was nothing more than a collection of flat metal plates welded around her scooter’s central rail. The plates protected her from micrometeorites and provided a heat sink to stabilize the ambient temperature, but her cabin wasn’t even pressurized; she relied on her suit for that. Mirrors, combined with thick leaded windows set in each of the cabin’s plates, gave her a reasonably good view in all directions.

She looked over her minuscule spacecraft with the same care that Rantoul’s safety engineers inspected the colony’s hull and life-support systems, paying particular attention to the radiation counters. The giant space colony had grown from an orbiting base which serviced geosynchronous communications satellites, so it was inside the outer reaches of Earth’s radiation belts. Like all Toulie children, she learned respect for shielding in kindergarten and was most careful to assure her scooter would protect her while she was away from the colony. With the bulk of fuel tanks attached to its plates and a network of thin wires which generated a magnetic field to deflect charged particles, Jeanette’s spacecraft kept the worst of the radiation from reaching her.

Her scooter’s backbone was a rail scavenged from some long-forgotten scientific pallet. At the back end of the rail was a cluster of station-keeping rockets salvaged from a dead communications satellite. Fuel tanks strapped to the center of the rail supplemented those attached to the craft’s shielding plates. Jeanette rode inside her makeshift cabin motorcycle-style, strapped onto her seat with her legs on either side of the rail. The scooter hung from a cargo launch cradle, ready to be boosted into space by the colony’s electromagnetic launcher.

“Rantoul Departure, Flutterbye One,” she called on her suit radio. “Request launch for OceanLab.” The request was simple ceremony; they knew where she was going. She had already called ahead so Departure Control would have her trajectory calculations ready.

“Roger, Jeanette,” Departure Control answered. She recognized the voice, an elderly man who decided to retire in the comfort of South Cap’s low-gravity community. She had never met him, didn’t even know his name, but it was the same voice that sent her off on each tour and welcomed her home when she returned. “Hang on. We’re moving you to the launch station.”

With a little jerk, her scooter started moving. The launch cradle above her crawled along its track until she was extracted from her parking spot in the marina and aligned perfectly with the long axis of the cylindrical colony. Her control panel winked green, indicating the cradle’s satisfaction with its latch into launch position.

“Rantoul Departure, ready for launch,” she called. Her clock showed less than a minute to go. She leaned back against her suit, braced for acceleration.

“Flutterbye One, Rantoul Departure. Cleared for autolaunch at—Uh oh. Flutterbye One, hold.” A brief pause, then, “We’ve got some bad news for you, Jeanette. You’ll have to hold for a while. Colorado Springs says your traj takes you right through the debris cloud that hit OceanLab.”

“But I can’t wait!” she protested. “OceanLab is leaking!”

“We know, Jeanette, but if you launch now, that debris cloud would do to your scooter the same thing it did to OceanLab.”

“I’m armored,” she said. She thought it shouldn’t be necessary to point out the obvious, but people were chosen to work in Rantoul’s transportation system based on their meticulous attention to detail. Safety was always more important to them than getting people to their destination.

“You are, but your engines aren’t. At best, you’d wind up being disabled, and we might not be able to get a rescue vehicle to you in time. Besides, you don’t want to have to pay for a rescue.”

“Hey, the bounty on this unscheduled service would more than cover a rescue flight!” She was getting desperate. With each passing second, OceanLab lost a bit more of its atmosphere.

A different voice, stem and feminine, rang in her headphones. “Flutterbye One, Rantoul Departure Control. Your launch window opens in 132 minutes. We can continue to provide keep-alive power to your spacecraft if you care to hold where you are, or we can move you back to your berth. Say your intentions.”

Jeanette sighed. She knew Maisie Johnson; trying to charm her way past Rantoul’s safety chief was hopeless. “I’ll wait it out here,” she said. “Don’t have time to get out of my suit anyway.”

“OK, Jeanette, we’re still with you,” Maisie answered. “We’ve apprised the Seattle Aquarium of your mission status. They want to chat. Want me to connect you to them?”

“Thanks Maisie. Please do.” She relaxed against her suit and watched the Universe rotate around her.

“Jeanette, Mark Blevin here, at the Seattle Aquarium. Don’t believe we’ve met. I’m the director of life science research down here. We’ve heard about your mission delay, and thought you’d like to hear about OceanLab’s status.”

So the aquarium had the brass on line for this one! Jeanette glanced up at the Earth. The terminator was approaching North America’s eastern seaboard; people in Greenwich would be starting to think about lunch The man got up in the middle of the night just to talk to her! “No, Dr. Blevin, I’m sure we haven’t met. I’ve never been to Earth. But I recognize your name from the OceanLab manuals. Yes, please, tell me about the laboratory.”

There was a brief transmission delay before Blevin responded. “Call me Mark, please. We don’t stand on ceremony here. Well, the report I’ve got says the leak rate was slowing for a while as the pressure dropped, but all at once the pressure went back up, almost to normal, and the leak rate stepped up with it. At the same time relative humidity in the lab went up to 100 percent.”

“It sounds like one of the aquariums broke open,” Jeanette said.

Another brief delay. “That’s what we think, too. From what we can tell, all the punctures are in the dry section of the lab, but we don’t think it’s so dry any more. Is that going to cause a problem for you? Can you still patch the leaks?”

She thought about the emergency patches in OceanLab’s equipment lockers. “No, I don’t think it’ll be a problem. The water shouldn’t bother the adhesive on the patches.”

“How about the fish?” she asked.

“We don’t know. We don’t have a good model for the effects of explosive decompression on fish. Half my folks argue it was a trivial pressure drop, only a fraction of a bar. The other half keep pointing out what happens when we try to bring deep-ocean fish to the surface too fast. We really won’t know until you get there.”

“OK, Mark; I understand. How long do I have before it’s hopeless? Is there enough time for me to stop the leaks before the rest of the fish die? It’ll take me at least an hour to patch the leaks, assuming I can find them as soon as I arrive.”

“We’ve run out the predictions, Jeanette. It looks pretty bleak. The lab will be near vacuum before you complete your rendezvous. There might have been some hope if you could have launched from Rantoul on schedule, but that opportunity is gone now. In any case, we’d like you to put top priority on retrieving specimen one ten stroke nine one, the big octopus. Dead or alive.”

One ten stroke nine one? Oscar. Oh, Oscar! By rolling her shoulder, she managed to snake a hand inside her helmet to wipe her eyes. She sniffed back a tear and answered. “OK, I’ll do that. Uh, Mark, could you let me think for a while?”

“Sure, Jeanette. Call us if you need us. My folks tell me once you’re free of Rantoul, we’ll be able to talk to you direct on your S-band radio during the first half of your flight. And good luck! Seattle Aquarium out.”

“Flutterbye One out.”

The Sun rose again as Central Station’s launcher rotated into daylight, but it could not dispel her gloom. Try as she might, she was unable to drive the image of her octopus friend from her mind. Oscar, frightened and confused, with no way to understand what was happening, was suffocating. One of the tanks broke. Was it his? Was he already dead, a mass of contusions from gas bubbles expanding in his little cephalopod arteries?

Of all the creatures in all her laboratories, Oscar was her favorite. The apes in FreedomLab provided continuous amusement, but they just weren’t as personable as that little octopus. Oscar loved to play. He spent his days chasing fish and stalking lobsters. One of his favorite games was to gather little air bubbles floating in the zero-g aquarium until he had one big bubble. Then he would climb inside and sit there in a compact lump, watching Jeanette while he paddled around with a few tentacles protruding through bubble wall.

Every time she entered the lab, he would rush to the aquarium’s glass partition to greet her, waving his tentacles in excitement. Complex patterns of color, reds and grays with hints of blue and green, rippled along his body in time with his waving. Sometimes he entertained her by spreading out all eight tentacles from his air bubble, becoming an eight-pointed star dancing through the water. Other times he glided rhythmically back and forth on his jet, swooping in graceful loops with a trail of bubbles marking his passage the way a precision astrobatic team trailed glowing smoke.

OceanLab had one port in its wet lab, a leftover from its early days as life sciences research facility on a long-retired space station. On the video from the lab, Jeanette had seen Oscar spend hours looking out the port whenever she wasn’t aboard. She often wondered if he were looking for her, waiting for her to return.

She would return, but she feared that this time there would be no Oscar pressed against the glass waiting for her. There was nothing she could do about it. Nothing but wait. And cry.

“Flutterbye One, Rantoul Departure Control. Five minutes to launch.” The voice startled her awake. It was the old man again. “Still there, Jeanette?”

“I’m awake. Board’s all green. Strapped in. Engine check… good engines. OK, brakes free. Good comm with the launch cradle. Flutterbye One ready for launch.”

“Flutterbye One, three minutes and counting. It’ll be quite a boost, Jeanette, three and half g’s almost all the way to the end of the cylinder before release. Hold onto your lunch!”

Her instrument panel counted down to zero, and the acceleration hit her. She felt her scooter bend beneath her and then snap back. The outer shell of Rantoul High Colony raced past, waving up and down above her. The acceleration was constant, but it felt like pressure was building up continuously against her back. Her scooter’s oscillation tightened into a tooth-numbing vibration. She mentally thanked Duke for the job he did in adjusting her padding; there were no pinch points, just a heavy hand flattening her against the back of her space suit.

The Sun blazed into view past the end of the colony, dazzling her before she could close her eyes. Then suddenly—Kerchunk! Release! Zero g! Her scooter throbbed in response, giving her a wild ride until its mechanical oscillations settled down. With reflexes honed by more than a hundred launches, her mind automatically adapted to the disorientation as she reswallowed her stomach.

Away from the colony, she had no reference points to attach her mind to. Only the faint motion of the star-field, residual rotation left over from the space colony’s lethargic spin, gave her a clue that she was not lying still in space. She tapped a button to stop the rotation so her antennas could seek out their targets. By flipping a cover over the forward viewport, she blocked out the Sun, darkening the cabin so she could better admire the blue and white half globe of the Earth hanging in space above her.

“Flutterbye One, good trajectory,” Departure Control reported a few seconds later.

“Thanks for the helping hand, Rantoul,” she answered. It was what she always said at the start of a tour. “See you in a few!”

“Have a good flight, Jeanette. We’re turning you over to Earth traffic control. Rantoul High Colony Departure Control Out.”

She watched her comm display automatically cycle to the frequency for Groundhog Central. “Flutterbye One, Colorado Springs, with you in transit via NavStar Forty Seven. We see a good trajectory for OceanLab. You’ll have a rendezvous bum in 319 minutes.”

“Colorado Springs, Flutterbye One. Roger. Good comm and traj. Request to go off tracking for direct link to Seattle.”

“Flutterbye One, off-track comm’s approved. They’re waiting for you.”

“OK. Recontact in one hour. I’ll monitor for an emergency breakthrough message. Flutterbye One out.”

Her comm panel balked when she punched in the Seattle aquarium’s calling code. With a sigh, she rolled her scooter until her antenna could establish a good signal with the northwestern United States. Groundhog Central used satellites for the link but the aquarium’s big antenna was above her on the Earth itself. Along with assurance it had acquired the signal, the comm panel told her she had an incoming call.

“Miz Ryan, Seattle Aquarium here.” The caller spoke quickly in wavering tenor tones—a young kid, excited or nervous about something, maybe both.

“Jeanette Ryan on Flutterbye One. Go ahead, Seattle.”

“Oh good! Miz Ryan, this is Charles A. French,” her contact replied. “Dr. Blevin is taking a nap and I didn’t want to wake him, but we didn’t want to miss the chance to tell you what we know. We have an update on the conditions at OceanLab.”

Aha! The son of the aquarium’s director. Which means his father is probably there, too. They’re really hauling out the bigwigs for this one! She was pleased with her audience; she was getting more attention for this one flight than she had ever had before. Despite her penchant for solitude, her tours were mostly an exercise in loneliness. She tended to try to make up for it when she had some human contact.

“Chipper! Pleased to meet you! Your dad has been telling me all about you! Congratulations on making valedictorian! And that’s enough of that miz crap. Call me Jeanette. Now, what’s up?”

“Sure. Uh, thank you, Jeanette,” Chipper French replied. “There’s an anomaly in the rate of pressure drop in the laboratory module. That is, it seems to have stopped leaking, or at least it isn’t leaking as fast as it should be. You might get there in time to save some of the specimens.”

She felt puzzled. “That’s odd. None of the maintenance bots at OceanLab has the ability to fix a puncture.”

“Er, just a minute…” There was a short pause. “Dad agrees with you. We can’t figure it out either. The reduction in leak rate is a series of step functions, so something must be plugging the holes one at a time. Dad thinks it must be some kind of debris moving around, getting sucked toward the punctures and clogging them. If this keeps up, the environmental control system will be able to make up for the loss and hold full atmospheric pressure for several days.” “Hey! Maybe Oscar is patching the leaks!”

“Who?”

“Octopus vulgaris, the big one,” Jeanette explained. “Specimen one ten stroke nine one.”

Another pause. “Dad says there’s no way. Octopi are bright, but they’re not that bright. Even if he understood the need to plug the holes, which isn’t likely, he’d never figure out how to use the patches.”

“Yeah, of course you’re right. I guess I’ll find out what it is when I get there. Any further instructions?” “Just to remind you that specimen one ten stroke nine one is still the highest priority. We still might be able to figure out how the animal processes docosahexaenoic acid by analyzing its muscle tissue. So no matter what, bring back the octopus. Even if it’s dead. You understand why that’s important, don’t you?”

Oscar!Jeanette didn’t want to think about the possibility that he might be dead. There was pressure at OceanLab. She just might be able to save him. She wanted to throttle up her scooter’s engines, to do anything to get there faster, but with a tight grip on her control panel echoing her clenched teeth she reminded herself there was nothing she could do to thwart the inexorable laws of orbital mechanics. Flutterbye was already on its fastest possible trajectory.

“Yeah, I understand,” she said, feeling the quaver in her voice. “DHA is the fatty acid the body uses for brain growth, and the human body can’t process fatty acids in zero g.”

“Dad says you’ve got it right,” Chipper agreed. “That’s why asteroid miners’ babies are usually retarded if they don’t get them into a gravity field.”

She winced at the thought of the rockballers’ babies; she’d met some of them. “It explains vegetarians’ babies, too. They need animal protein to develop their brains.”

“That’s a big one,” Chipper said. “We can feed a larger population down here if we can get everyone to adopt a vegetarian diet, but as long as we need docosahexaenoic acid, we’re going to be carnivores. But diets and babies aren’t all of it. We’re also looking for a way that human muscle tissue can use fatty acids for fuel. Right now your muscles are only burning carbohydrates; the fatty acids just build up and eventually get excreted. Some of the doctors down here think it might be worse than cardiovascular deconditioning. You must be familiar with those problems.”

“Uh huh. Spacer syndrome. It’s the story of my life.” She gritted her teeth in determination. “I’ll get that specimen even if there’s nothing else I can do at the lab.”

Her control panel interrupted, chirping for her attention. “Chipper, I have to barbecue my spacecraft for a while to even out the heat load, so I’ll have only intermittent communication. If you have anything more for me, you can call through Colorado Springs. I’m monitoring them for breakthroughs. Jeanette Ryan on Flutterbye One out.”

A tap on her control stick started the Universe slowly rotating around her. Every time Earth came into view, she strained to search out the tiny speck that would be OceanLab. Of course she couldn’t find it. She knew she wouldn’t be able to see the laboratory for hours, but felt disappointment nevertheless.

It was the dead of winter in Seattle. The people there would be living under thin layers of overcast clouds for the next couple months, an incessant light drizzle giving them a feeling of being enclosed, isolated from the rest of the world. The thought comforted her. If she ever moved to Earth, she would live in Seattle where she could feel protected by the overcast sky. She whiled away the hours of her flight by wondering what weather must be like.

Finally it was there, a minuscule spark of light centered in the cross hairs on her trajectory display. Reluctantly, Jeanette turned her scooter around. She could no longer see the lab, but she had to turn her back to it before she lit up her main engines for the rendezvous bum.

When the bum was complete, she was almost on top of her target. OceanLab looked like two cans with wings—the larger laboratory module was crowned with a tiny service module which doubled as an airlock. The wings were OceanLab s solar power arrays and radiators.

The laboratory looked odd, as if it had grown a patch of bristly hair in one spot. She nuzzled a switch on her neck ring to turn on the suit’s camera, and puzzled over her mental map of the lab; the bristles were all over the dry section. Her maneuvering rockets left her station-keeping alongside the service module, where she could nurse her vernier jets until the Flutterbye’s grapple fixture nestled into a capture latch at the entrance to the service module.

The furry patch on the lab intrigued her, so she decided to fly around OceanLab before going inside. She’d use her suit jets rather than bum up the Flutterbye’s precious fuel supply. The cold-gas jets in her suit had originally been intended to allow a space worker to rescue himself if he became detached from his spacecraft. Her suit didn’t have a lot of nitrogen for joy-riding, but she could recharge her backpack from the laboratory’s atmosphere tanks. A few hours less nitrogen wouldn’t make any difference to the dying OceanLab. Anticipating the frightening exhilaration of being surrounded by nothing but the cosmos, she pulled herself out of her scooter’s protective enclosure and floated free.

She wanted her hands inside her suit for the next maneuver, so she deflated her back bladder to get the volume she needed. By leaning back in her now roomy suit, she could extract both hands from her gloves and pull them inside. Her chest pack had outside switches for the suit’s tiny rockets, but the joysticks on her interior control panel gave her the precise control she needed for close piloting. With a few squirts of nitrogen, she floated over the service module and aimed herself at the furry patch on the laboratory.

Up close, it was obvious that OceanLab hadn’t really grown hair. The lacy streamers attached to the lab’s outer surface were ice, murky water ice tainted with streaks of red. Blood red. She touched one of the icicles. It broke. A spike of ice slipped away to reveal a thin white string protruding rigidly from its murky encasement. She stared at the string for a full minute before she finally realized what it was—a jellyfish tentacle. She thought about that for a moment, and then suddenly had to reswallow her bile. She hated jellyfish. Oscar did too. Perhaps he had taught her to hate them; she liked to watch him do horrible things to the loathsome creatures, tearing off their tentacles or tying them into Gordian knots. His ability to avoid the stinging nematocysts while manipulating the jellyfish never ceased to astound her.

Oscar! Is he all right? She wanted to hurry into the lab to find out, but disciplined herself to complete her survey of the exterior. It was easy to find the punctures. Even where hairy icicles had not formed, streamers of mist and snow showed each point where a meteorite had violated the integrity of the pressure vessel. It soon became obvious to her that patching the leaks was hopeless; there were so many punctures. She did not have enough material to even begin the job. She dismissed that part of the mission from her mind and became intent on collecting as many samples as possible before she ran out of time and had to return to Rantoul High Colony.

When her survey was complete, she flew to the service module’s single hatch. A telltale indicated the module was still at zero pressure, just as she had left it at the end of her last visit. Reassured that the hatch between the service module and lab had not been breached, she entered.

With her backpack latched into its donning rack, she activated the service module’s status displays and waited for the atmosphere to come up to normal pressure. Salinity measurements in the wet lab were all over the scale; not one of the gauges agreed with another. A major shift in the lab’s center of gravity soon after the incident matched her theory that one of the fish tanks had broken open suddenly. And the time history of pressure in the lab was exactly as the folks at the Seattle aquarium had told her—normal up until the meteorite puncture, then gradually tapering off after the incident. There was a series of breakpoints in the curve where the rate of pressure drop suddenly slowed. By the time she got there, the lab was back up to its normal pressure, but the repressurization gas supply was dangerously low. Even at its normal leak rate, the lab would not hold out more than a few weeks.

The service module’s pressure display leveled out and a valve on the inner hatch popped open with a tiny cloud of mist. Normal pressure. She wiggled out of her suit, glad that the system included heaters for the atmosphere. The bulky long underwear Duke had made for her had a slippery, almost obscenely soft fabric that simplified the job of doffing her space suit in zero gravity.

Immediately, she moved to the window in the hatch separating her from the lab, but it was misted over. Her own reflection grinned back at her, a clown face of smeared makeup. She tried to scold herself for not taking a few seconds to wash her face once she’d canceled her dinner date with Beverly, but a new observation brought back her mirth. The odd bulges of her padded underwear and the Medusa cloud of hair surrounding her face added even more clownishness to her appearance. Still, she was happy Duke had done such a good job on the underwear; in addition to keeping her cool, it kept her from floating around and chafing on every joint in her suit.

“Can’t let Oscar see me like this!” she said aloud. She slipped out of her longjohns and scrubbed off her makeup with a wet towel from OceanLab’s tiny personal hygiene station. She rummaged through storage lockers for something to wear in the lab, but knew the search was futile. She didn’t store clothing at OceanLab, and no one else ever came there. A couple towels might serve as a makeshift bikini, but it didn’t seem worth the bother. She regretted not taking the time to grab some shorts and a T-shirt before leaving Rantoul, but when she left the space colony, she didn’t know how much time she would have before her launch.

Oh well, personal prudishness aside, nobody will see me, she reminded herself.

She had not even brought a ribbon to tie her hair back, but a wire tie would suffice. Then, with a snap of her chin toward her suit, she thought of something. She hurried to the donning rack, reaching up inside to her helmet’s neck ring, and switched off the video recorder. She could edit out any interesting parts before transmitting the data to the Seattle Aquarium. As an afterthought, she turned the recorder back on, in audio-only mode.

“Well, I’ve learned all I can from the instruments. Let’s see what the lab looks like.”

Gray fog enveloped her as soon as she had cranked open the laboratory door. Droplets of water coalesced and clung to her skin. The larger water bubbles wiggled as she moved, giving her an itchy tickling sensation. OceanLab normally smelled faintly of lubricants and ozone, but the mist surrounding her had a fishy odor. When she inhaled the vapor, its salty taste reminded her of the Japanese restaurant on Rantoul. Beverly often praised that restaurant, saying it smelled like the breeze blowing onshore from the Gulf of Mexico in her native town of Galveston. That was just one of those things where Jeanette could not agree with her friend; she thought the restaurant’s odor was repulsive. Besides, some of the things they served there gave her the creeps.

The hatchway felt slippery, and seemed to be vibrating under her touch. She puzzled about the vibration for a moment until she realized it wasn’t OceanLab doing the shaking; it was her fingers. In all the time she had been working on OceanLab, she had never actually had to touch the fish. Now, with no knowledge of what really lay beyond the door in front of her, she was about to enter their domain.

She couldn’t see much past her reach, so she carefully groped her way through the hatch into the laboratory. The mist was everywhere, but she found she had no problem breathing. That was a relief; she didn’t need her suit. To get the suit into the wet lab, she would have had to take it apart and push the pieces through the inner hatch one by one, only to waste more time reassembling it.

The foggy atmosphere forced her to work from memory. She got her bearings by following a series of handrails to the control panels and electronics racks. Some of the displays glowed fuzzily through a coating of water. A faint gurgling sound came from the direction of the air conditioner intakes.

Spherical globules of water floated about, forming into larger globs when they collided. One of them touched her hip. When she unconsciously reached down to brush it away, her hand contacted something solid. She looked. It was a fish, quite dead. The fish’s gills were puffed out, a slimy mess of red tissue. Jeanette shrieked in surprise. She batted the dead fish away from her and waited for a wave of revulsion to pass. Only after the fish was lost in the mist did she think to wonder about its species.

“Oscar, where are you?” she called in frustration. Her voice sounded oddly muted, with none of the immediate echoes she was used to hearing in OceanLab. There was no response, but she didn’t expect one—even if the octopus recognized her voice, he had no organs for making sound.

Something fluttered near her ear. She turned and found a tiny fingerling pompano inches from her nose. The fish was quite alive, frantically waving its fins and tail as it tried to swim through the humid air. Jeanette had no better idea, so she delicately tapped the pompano with her fingertip, keeping the physical contact as brief as she could. This time she felt only a brief shudder of squeamishness from having to actually touch one of the sea creatures. Her aim was good; the fish drifted off with a gentle spin until it entered a water bubble the size of her space helmet. Once inside the bubble, the pompano momentarily circled and then settled down, apparently content with its return to a more familiar environment.

By moving along the handrails around the normally dry part of the laboratory, she was able to continue her investigation. Most of the sea creatures she encountered were dead, but at least a few hundred had survived. She avoided contact with the walls. Spiny urchins and starfish had attached themselves there, each enclosed in a growing water bubble it had scraped off the wall. Undulating spheres of water floated around her, some inhabited by tiny fish, some devoid of obvious life. She dodged around the water bubbles as best she could, especially those inhabited by gruesome-looking baby squid.

Before the incident, OceanLab was partitioned into three sections—the dry lab where she normally did her work, her high-pressure aquarium for deep-sea creatures, and the wet lab. The wet lab occupied almost three-quarters of OceanLab’s volume.

From the moment she heard of OceanLab’s collision with that debris cloud, Jeanette had been building a scenario in her mind. When she found nothing but more mist and water globules where a rigid pane of glass should be separating the dry lab from the wet, her scenario was confirmed.

She spoke her analysis aloud, hoping her suit could hear her well enough to record her notes. “The station’s dry lab must have been punctured, causing a sudden drop in pressure. It had to be the dry lab; if the wet lab had been hit, there wouldn’t be a station left. Air is compressible; water is not. I know spacers who found out the hard way what happens when a high-velocity meteoroid hits their liquid fuel tanks—the incompressible fluid transmits the full force of the collision to the tank walls, and the vessel explodes. The same would have happened to OceanLab if the wet section had been punctured.”

Repeated contact with the alien water-breathing animals had left her feeling jittery. She hoped her recorded voice would not betray her nervousness as she theorized about the events which led to the demise of OceanLab.

The glass separating the water from the dry lab had to be big and flat so video cameras could monitor all the activity in the aquarium. With the same pressure on both sides, the glass panes only needed to be strong enough to withstand an occasional bump from the human researcher. The service manual said the panes were actually cyanoacrylic, not real silicon glass. The material was several times stronger than what would be needed to stand up to the most clumsy human visitor, but Jeanette’s bumbling about in zero gravity was nothing compared to the forces acting across the surface of each pane when pressure in the dry lab suddenly dropped. Air could not flow through the pressure-equalization membranes fast enough to matter, and water would not penetrate the membranes at all. Tons of force must have built up against the transparent panes in seconds, until at least one of them blew out.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a great design after all,” Jeanette said, continuing her narrative. “Should have included some sort of blow-out valve, like we have on our fuel tanks. But—yikes!”

A sputtering sound startled her. A vague dark shape the size of her forearm was moving through the mist toward her. Her mind conjured up irrational images of aquatic horrors. There were sharks among the laboratory’s fish population, but the largest were still tiny things no more than six inches long. Even if one of the minuscule predators were stupid enough to attack her, the worst it could do would be to take a small nibble from her exposed hide. But she couldn’t stop her mind from imagining. This thing was larger than any shark she had seen in OceanLab, and it made noise.

Fingers clenched on a handrail, arm muscles knotted, she floated poised to launch herself in any direction away from the approaching menace. Another sputter sounded from the vague apparition, then suddenly it burst forth through a bubble of murky water heading directly toward her. She saw a wide gaping mouth; her mind filled in ravenous sharp teeth and slimy, gruesome gills. Without further thought she heaved against the handrail and propelled herself to the side out of the attacking creature’s path. It slid past, gurgling and sputtering as it entered another bubble.

Just before the creature slipped out of her view, she realized what it was. A snailsub. Just a snailsub, doing its best to control itself as it alternately plunged through air and water on its housecleaning rounds of the laboratory. Jeanette knew OceanLab’s equipment to the last bolt; despite her panic, her analysis of the snailsub’s plight took less than a second. There should have been no real danger, but it was best to get out of its way. Normally the snailsubs moved very slowly, using sonar to avoid running into the wet lab’s inhabitants. This one was moving too fast, probably confused because the air moving through its venturis was so much less dense than the water the snailsub expected. It should have turned away before it got so close to a creature as large as her, but perhaps its sonar couldn’t cope with the unfamiliar medium either.

Relief from her tension should have come with understanding the mysterious object, but in her panicked flight, she lost her bearings. She had induced a fast rotation; foggy mist spun about her. When she snapped her head around to see where she was going, a globule of water smacked into her face. Then she bumped into a wall.

A stabbing pain lanced her left thigh, outside, just above her knee. Her leg thrashed in reflex and the pain grew sharply more intense. She yelped, as much from surprise as from the pain. Gasping in a lungful of water, she choked, coughing out the brine. Her elbow banged into the wall, and it felt like something else bit her, worse than before, something with a thousand stinging teeth chewing into her hip. Jeanette screamed and kicked, pushing herself away from the wall. Her breath came in short bursts. Every limb quivered in tense apprehension. The thing was still biting her!

As she floated, she twisted around to find out what was attacking her. There were no marks on her thigh, just a couple dozen tiny red welts that puffed up into bumps on her skin as she watched. They hurt, pain nerves firing with every pulse of her heart. Contorting herself further, she quickly checked for the second assailant and discovered the source of her problem. There, stuck in the flesh of her hip, she found the reddish brown spines of the sea urchin. A few were driven deep, others bent and broken. She was bleeding from more puncture wounds which surrounded the spines from the luckless urchin.

Cursing herself, the Seattle Aquarium, and everything that lived in water, she began the excruciating process of pulling out the spines one by one. By the time she had them all out, her leg began to feel like it was burning at the site of her wounds. She found a handrail and, after checking for more sea creatures, clung to it until she could calm herself and get her bearings. She could hear the ventilation intake gurgling nearby, and concluded she was on the laboratory’s ceiling.

“Oscar, where are you?” she screamed.

She heard a distant, muffled squeak followed by something that sounded for all the world like a bad case of flatulence. Some creature might have responded to her call. But it couldn’t be. There were no dolphins here. Nothing in OceanLab made any sound. There should just be the fluttering of desperate fins and the burbling of the robot submarines.

“Get hold of yourself, Jeanette,” she told herself. “You came here to do a job. Now just do it.”

With the laboratory leaking and no way to find her prized octopus, she decided the best she could do was to recover as many samples as she could while there was still time. Sample collection posed another problem—the only containers she had available to transport the specimens back to Rantoul were the small transparent plastic vials they had originally come in. But the permanent residents of OceanLab had arrived as eggs; only the smallest fingerlings would fit into the vials now. She was forced to settle for bringing home the tiniest animals she could find.

With a cargo net filled with clattering plastic vials trailing behind her, she began a long methodical trek around the lab. Her primary targets were small fish enclosed in their own water bubbles; she could quickly scoop up both the animal and its environment in a single motion without having to actually touch them with her fingers. After collecting a dozen samples, she decided to be more picky and skipped easy targets in favor of searching out a more varied sample of species.

She kept up a running narrative as she worked, calling out the number on each sample container and the aquatic life it contained. Jeanette had long developed a habit of talking to herself whenever she was alone in one of her laboratories, but the dull, anechoic environment was getting to her. She tended to shout, as much to reassure herself that there was still a universe beyond her reach as to make sure her helmet microphones would pick up her voice. Occasionally she paused in her work to call for Oscar. Often she thought she could hear that same enigmatic squeak in response, but she began to wonder if it were just her hopeful imagination; octopi do not have voices.

Her venture carried her deeper into the lab until she was working in the volume which had once been the wet lab, the huge salt water aquarium which was OceanLab’s primary purpose. Here the environment was more water than air, huge sloppy spheres with identifiable ripples and currents on their surfaces. She would have to be careful not to get her face stuck inside a globule of liquid.

An undulating wall of water stretched vertically from floor to ceiling, separating the back of the wet lab from the erstwhile dry lab. Wavelets sloshing along the wall reminded her of the low-g swimming pool in Rantoul High Colony. Suddenly the image of the swimming pool was too strong; vertigo spun through her mind as she lost her gravity orientation. She retreated, clinging to a bent piece of framework until she convinced herself the laboratory floor was down.

Lights reflecting off the water wall made it difficult to see what remained of the aquatic life immersed beyond her reach. She didn’t want to abandon her search for Oscar as long as she still had time in the lab, but she had exhausted all the likely places she could look in the aerated volume. If the octopus was still alive, he had to be in the water. She was reluctant to go back for her space suit, but the laborious process of disassembling and reassembling the suit seemed to be the only way she could enter the liquid domain. She was on her way back to the service module to retrieve her suit when she came upon the remnants of the laboratory’s water lock.

“Finally, a bit of luck,” she told herself.

The water lock was a transparent plastic cylinder a meter long, with doors at each end. On every visit to OceanLab, Jeanette had used the water lock to retrieve the little submarines from the aquarium for servicing. The thin, rigid plastic window at one end of the lock was missing, probably popped out in a collision with some other part of the lab when the aquarium wall failed, but the other end was still intact. By inserting the good end into the water, she could use the lock as a sighting device to inspect the regions beyond her reach.

Her makeshift sighting tube allowed her to gather some new varieties of fish. Here, farther from the area which took the brunt of the pressure wave that occurred when the aquarium wall broke, she found very few dead fish. She whooped with joy as she scooped up several tiny flounder with one swipe of a sample container. These flounder were her own discovery, a strain unique to OceanLab—their eyes didn’t migrate to the same side of their bodies as the fish matured. The Seattle Aquarium had paid her a huge bonus for the discovery and even named the fish the Ryan Strain after her, citing her paper where she speculated that in an environment where there is no sea floor, there was no advantage for the terrestrial species’ adaptation to dwelling beneath the sand.

Her joy with recovering samples of the Ryan flounder was quashed when she found Oscar’s pet grouper. Near a construction of fake coral—actually a mineral foam made of the slag left over from smelting Moon soil for its aluminum—the big fish hung dormant in the water. Its distended gills told the story; the grouper must have been killed by decompression. Jeanette puzzled over this. If she were right about how the grouper died, it must have been near the wet lab wall when it broke. But if that were the case, why was the animal now so deep in the water? It should have been floating around the dry lab with all the other dead fish. No matter how the grouper died, though, its death was a tragedy. Oscar had long been fond of the big fish. She thought of it as Oscar’s pet. Hours of video observations had shown that one of his hobbies was feeding the grouper bits of lobster flesh, a delicacy otherwise unavailable to the big fish.

In her ruminations over the demise of Oscar’s pet, she almost overlooked a vital clue to the whereabouts of her cephalopod friend. But a thought nagged at the back of her mind as she continued her search for more specimens. All was not quite right with the gray speckled surface of the fake coral. When the realization hit her, she hurriedly moved her sighting tube back to where she had first spotted the grouper. Indeed, there was a darker vein running through the rock. The surface was smoother in spots. She traced the dark vein, and saw them; molten gold cat’s eyes, staring unblinkingly back at her from inside a tiny rounded hole in the rock just a few centimeters beyond the surface of the water. Oscar!

“Oscar!” she squealed. A thrill of joy coursed through her mind; tears welled up in her eyes. He’s alive! She wiped her eyes on her soggy forearm; it didn’t help much.

Suddenly the dark vein paled and then turned red. It flashed back into the coral, a tentacle being withdrawn. The speckled golden eyes drew deeper into the hole. They stared back at her through narrow vertical slits rimmed in crimson.

“Oscar, don’t you recognize me?” She heard her own voice, shrill with stress and frustration, and realized what was wrong. The octopus was terrified, and had every right to be. Just thinking about the hundreds of suckers clinging to the fake coral told her it would be impossible to extract the animal from his hole by force, not if she wanted to keep him alive. And she desperately wanted to keep him alive.

“Oh, I’ve frightened you.” Now Jeanette lowered her voice, soft and chatty, almost cooing. It was the tone she had always used in talking to Oscar when she visited OceanLab. “It’s me, Oscar, Jeanette. You know me, Oscar. You’ll be safe now. You can come out now, Oscar.” By slowly moving the end of the sighting tube near Oscar’s eyes, she allowed him to get a good look at her face. The octopus tried to draw even farther away, but he was trapped by the size of the hole he had chosen to hide in.

Then, the tip of one tentacle sneaked out. It was a mottled dark gray now. Good; that was the color Oscar took on when he was relaxed. Tentatively the tentacle touched the transparent window of her sighting tube and explored the rim of the canister. A few suckers pasted themselves against the little window, and she felt a little tug on her sighting tube. When the tube moved, the tentacle immediately let go and disappeared into the hole in the rock. There was just a faint ripple of red this time; he wasn’t angry, but his fear showed in the pale gray which enveloped his body.

She kept talking, telling Oscar about her flight to OceanLab and how interesting things were in the laboratory. She didn’t expect him to understand her, but these were the subjects she always talked with him about when she first arrived at the lab. If her tone could match what he was used to, he might calm down and come out of his hiding place.

Again a tentacle snaked out, this time feeling its way along the canister of her sighting tube. Jeanette recoiled with a squeal when a few of the suckers touched her face, and again Oscar snapped back into his hole. Gritting her teeth and swallowing hard to quell her feeling of revulsion, she tried reversing the sighting tube, inviting the octopus to hide in this new, convenient hole. He wouldn’t budge. Perhaps the hole was too large for him to feel comfortably safe; she was amazed that Oscar could interpolate himself into such a tiny aperture. After several minutes of coaxing, he still hadn’t moved. She reluctantly concluded she would have to touch the animal, get him used to her, before he could overcome his fear and release his grip on the rock.

Which meant she would have to overcome her fear of him. A shudder ran up her spine. In a panicked thought, she again considered going after her suit. But if she left him now, he might move to some place where she would never find him before she had to leave OceanLab. It was now or never.

He drew back as her extended finger approached him, but he was in a cul-de-sac. She hesitated for a moment, a heartbeat away from contact, and then clenched her jaw tight and stroked Oscar’s face. With one quivering finger she lightly traced the furrow between his bulging eyes. To her surprise, it was not as bad as she had anticipated. He was not at all slimy; his skin had the texture of fine leather, soft yet firm. She kept cooing to him, mouthing inanities in a tone that would put a baby to sleep or inspire playful thoughts in a grown man.

Oscar seemed to relax, just a bit at first. His skin seemed less firm, less tense. She stroked behind his brow ridges. He seemed to enjoy this, moved forward a bit. Eventually he slid a tentacle out from his hiding place and touched her hand. Jeanette winced inwardly, but tried not to let her revulsion show. His suckers pulsed against the skin on the back of her hand, but didn’t cling. The tentacle moved along her forearm and encircled it, gently exploring, latching on briefly and then releasing. Then to Jeanette’s horror he suddenly shot out of his hole and grabbed on to her arm with all eight tentacles.

This time she instinctively recoiled, trying to push herself away from the animal, but there was nothing to push against. Her heart pounded, raising the throbbing ache she felt in the wounds she had received from the sea urchin spines. The lab rotated around her, but her concentration was on the small dark cephalopod attached to her arm. Oscar’s golden eyes locked on to her gaze, alive with interest, pupils so dilated they were almost round. Often she had noticed Oscar’s eyes tracked independently, giving him the goofy appearance of a half-wit, but for a moment, she felt she was looking into the eyes of an old wizened man. The classic painting of Albert Einstein came to her mind, eyes that hinted of intelligence almost beyond human imagining. Then just as quickly he was again Oscar, her octopus friend, looking around and exploring his environment with his eyes the way he always did.

He was a very young octopus, and as yet not very large. His head seemed disproportionately large compared to photographs she’d seen of terrestrial octopi, but when he fanned himself out he was not much more than two meters across, tentacle tip to tentacle tip. Nevertheless, once Jeanette had convinced herself she could cope with having the sea creature clinging to her arm, she became nervous about his strength. She had seen him rip apart lobsters and huge Australian crayfish; he could just as easily do the same to her forearm. In a vain attempt to coax him away from her without losing him, she again offered her sighting tube as an alternative home. The octopus looked over the defunct water lock, but he either didn’t understand why she was showing it to him or just was not interested. He remained affixed to her arm, busily examining the function of her elbow and finger joints with gentle tugs.

She endured her terror when he stroked her nose. Perhaps he was just mimicking the way she had stroked his face. But when he tried to insert a tentacle into her mouth, she frantically slapped the appendage away. While he was exploring her rib cage, she noticed his breathing tube. He was actually out of the water, but Oscar seemed to have no difficulty breathing the humidity-laden air. Her brief surprise at this was dispelled by recalling the many hours he had spent lolling about in air bubbles. Jeanette wanted to log this observation—perhaps even fish might be able to breathe humid air in zero gravity conditions—but was reluctant to raise her voice loud enough for her helmet recorder to hear.

She was prepared when Oscar reached inquisitively for her breast; she had been expecting him to notice them eventually. Gently, she pushed the exploring tentacle away with one finger. The octopus reacted to this by desisting from his explorations, apparently content with the reassurance he found in simply holding on to her forearm.

When she was convinced Oscar was not going to leave her, she decided to use her remaining time gathering more life specimens. He didn’t seem to mind being dragged around as she worked her way along the handrails, scooping up tiny fish. The way he twisted his body around to follow her movements, his eyes intently tracking her fingers, was a bit disconcerting. When he shifted his grip on her arm, she saw tiny reddish circles where his suckers had been. The discoloration worried her at first, but the marks quickly faded. She took some comfort from observing that at least he wasn’t covering her with tiny hickies.

She was just getting used to having him on her arm when, after a few minutes of watching her collect samples, Oscar suddenly released his grip on her and darted off with a squeak and a blatt. She stared after him, mouth agape. It was the same odd series of sounds she had heard before—the sound of the octopus’s jet propulsion system, in air.

“Oscar! Come back!” she called in dismay. She tried to kept her voice was low and gentle despite her intense fear that she had lost him.

His jet fired a few more times, somewhere off in the fog. She tried to figure out what direction she should take to pursue him, but he was moving too quickly to follow. All she could do was to call for him to come back, and wait. The pain of waiting was compounded by the throbbing pain from her wounds and her apprehension that she might not find him again.

She had time enough to become seriously worried. She was already out of condition from her previous tour and exhausted from this one. Brief moments of disorientation began to plague her mind. Disorientation was not uncommon at the end of a long tour, especially one where she had been working as hard as she had been that day; but these bouts of dizziness were more severe and more frequent than she had experienced before. She began to wonder if they were more than just the end-of-tour willies, and thought of the venom in sea urchin spines.

After several excruciating minutes, Oscar came sailing back through the mist. Three tentacles grabbed her arm just as before; in each of the other five was coiled a sample tube. He held the tubes in front of him, looking intently at her eyes. Bands of color ran along his tentacles, this time a definite shade of olive among the mottled gray. She obediently examined sample tubes and found that each contained exactly one tiny fish immersed in water, all identical, baby kingfish as best she could tell. The caps were all screwed on tight.

Jeanette was flabbergasted. The octopus had figured out what she was doing, and was trying to help! She found herself smiling at Oscar, and wondered if a smile meant anything to a creature whose mouth was a beak, and usually kept well out of sight.

“Why, thank you, Oscar!” He couldn’t possibly understand her, but she hoped her tone would carry the message. She continued the same tone with a more private thought. “It’s not much help since I already have more than enough kingfish samples, but I do appreciate your effort.” She accepted the samples from him, one by one, and inserted the tubes into her cargo net. Again, Oscar followed her every motion. Then, with a quickness she was just beginning to get used to, darted to the net and clung to it. He snaked two tentacles into the net and started manipulating the sample tubes, moving them close to his eyes as if carefully examining each one. To her dismay, he again blasted off into the murk.

There was nothing Jeanette could do but try to stay in the same spot so he could find her again. She kept talking, calling gently to him and wishing he would stay with her.

This time, he returned with another cargo net filled with more sample tubes, and each tube contained a different species: fish of several types, tiny urchins, starfish, baby eels, and even one minuscule jellyfish. The only repetition was in a series of eight vials, each of which had a baby lobster stuffed inside. Jeanette chuckled. Oscar always did have a yen for lobster!

As if in response to her laugh, Oscar released her arm, rolled all eight tentacles into tight coils, and then quickly unrolled them like a circle of party whistles. He repeated the coiling and uncoiling motion several times, until she laughed again. Jeanette remembered seeing him do that before, especially after he had played a particularly nasty trick on a jellyfish.

The silliness of it always drew a chuckle from her, but for the first time she realized this tentacle play just might be Oscar’s own version of laughter. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have tentacles; it seemed the action would be quite a tension-reliever.

Pop! Whoosh! Her ears suddenly filled with cotton. She could hear a distant whine, like gas moving through a high-pressure line. The lab was losing pressure! A dense funnel cloud appeared a few meters away from her, pointing to the open puncture where there precious air supply was leaking to space. The hole was too small to see through the tiny hurricane it created.

Abruptly Oscar jetted off again toward the wet lab. He returned in seconds with the long stinging tentacles of a jellyfish trailing behind him. With a sickening splat, he slammed the jellyfish down in the middle of the vapor cloud, and the whining stopped. She stared dumbly as the octopus spun in the air in front of her, joyously party-whistling his tentacles. He tagged her arm briefly, filled his cargo net with her remaining empty sample containers, and then just as suddenly launched himself back into the fog.

Again, Jeanette was left with mouth agape. Realization of how the holes in OceanLab got patched pushed her mind past concept shock. She had seen it with her own eyes; she had to accept it. Somehow Oscar had figured out that the holes needed to be patched and used the most convenient material available to him to do the job. She tried to think like an octopus, wondering what would lead him to decide to patch the leaks, but found she just didn’t know enough about how cephalopods thought to make the transition.

Her painful wounds were beginning to demand as much attention from her as she could devote to Oscar and the sample-collecting process. The sudden drop in pressure seemed to make it even worse. She feared that in her weakened condition she was even more susceptible to the urchins’ venom that she normally would be. While Oscar was off on another hunting mission, she considered just staying at OceanLab for a few weeks to recuperate. It would be fun just watching Oscar jetting around. I wonder what a real hug from an octopus would be like?

The octopus interrupted her daydreaming when he returned with more samples. He was a little parachute, falling toward her, tentacles spread wide in a braking maneuver in the air. It was nice to be flying in the lunar caverns with her boyfriend, Oscar.

She shook her head violently, trying to clear it. It made her dizzy. “Oscar, what have I been thinking? We have to get out of here! OceanLab is leaking, and I’m losing it. I need medical help, and fast. Let’s get to Flutterbye while I can still pilot.”

With Oscar clinging to her left arm, she towed the nets full of sample containers into OceanLab’s command module. The air was still reasonably clear in the command module, but shining spheres of water had collected there. She wiped a film of water from the environmental control displays to see that the laboratory’s leak rate was increasing; Oscar’s makeshift jellyfish plugs had been effective for a few hours, but were failing. Faced with a medical emergency, she dared not take the time to use the few mechanical patches she had at the lab. There was nothing to be done but to abandon the laboratory to its fate. Perhaps the Seattle Aquarium would give her a contract to come back and fix it, if they could afford the tons of water needed to refill the fish tanks.

With a wistful sigh, she dogged the laboratory hatch closed for what might be the last time. Its valves closed within seconds, maintaining pressure in the command module as the lab continued to leak its precious atmosphere and water.

Pulling on her underwear put more pressure on her wounds, and her leg increased its protestations in response. She slipped her right arm into its sleeve and tried to coax Oscar to move there so she could finish donning the underwear. The octopus tested the fabric with his tentacles, but was reluctant to release his hold on her left arm. His suckers could gain no purchase on the slippery fabric of her underwear. Talking to him about the problem produced no discernible results, but she finally got him to budge by stuffing her left arm into its sleeve even while he was still clinging to it. He moved ahead of the encroaching fabric to her upper arm and, when that location was obviously no longer safe, snaked out a tentacle to her rib cage and latched on.

Jeanette felt her skin crawl. All her phobias rushed back in response to tickling, itchy sensation from his suckers. Mentally, she throttled her panic, fighting an incredible desire to bat the creature away, to grab it and tear it off her skin. She thought of his beak, the jagged instrument Oscar used to crack open lobsters and crayfish, pressed against her own delicate hide, and shuddered. It was too much, she had to get him off of her.

“Oscar, you have to let go,” she cooed. “I can’t put on my space suit while you’re holding on to me.”

The octopus returned her gaze, his huge black-and-gold eyes imploring. He held close to her, tentacles giving rise to squirmy sensations as they encircled her torso beneath her underwear. Her heart was touched by this. He was behaving like a baby, clinging to its mother.

Or was he? Was he afraid to let go of her, or was he trying to tell her something?

She stared at him. He stared back.

Reality dawned in her mind. Despite her weariness and the progressive influence of toxins in her bloodstream, she suddenly felt quit lucid. “On, no. You can’t possibly understand the problem. You’re an octopus, a slithery, playful dumb animal. A water-breathing mollusk.”

He snuggled even tighter against her, and squeaked with his breathing tube. Again, she swallowed her revulsion, took deep breaths to calm her shudders. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, unsuccessfully trying to make her heart slow down.

“Oscar, you won’t fit into one of these little sample containers and I have nothing else to carry you in.” The animal just looked at her. “Uh uh. No. It won’t work. You cannot ride home in my suit. There’s no room! I don’t care how small of a space you can hide in, you’d be crushed as soon as I inflated my back bladder, and I can’t get my hands into the gloves without doing that.”

Oscar rotated his eye turret toward the donning rack and examined her space suit. He looked back at Jeanette. An inquiry.

She shook her head. “Oh, this is ridiculous! There’s no way you can understand me, but just forget it. You’re not going to ride in my helmet. The very thought is disgusting, and besides it’s dangerous. If you blocked my vision at the wrong time, we both could be killed!” She saw that same insistent gaze. He relaxed his grip slightly, and then again snuggled against her, sending more crawlies through her nervous system. This time he squeezed her so hard she had difficulty breathing, but a few quick breaths pulsed her diaphragm enough for Oscar to get the message. He relaxed his grip, slightly.

There was nothing to be done for it; she had to relent. “Oh, Oscar. All right. You can hang on right where you are; I’ll just have to endure it. I can use the suit without my underwear, but I’m going to get a lot of bruises. Maybe even frostbite from the lack of thermal balancing. And you just stay out of my helmet!”

She added an afterthought: “And for godsake don’t get scared and start releasing ink!”

The bleary fog in Jeanette’s mind was worse than the atmosphere inside OceanLab by the time she was ready to contact Colorado Springs for guidance. She told herself she should have skipped a second photo tour outside the laboratory. Her piloting had been clumsy. Her dulled reflexes would have been reason enough not to risk it, but banging around in an overlarge suit without the stability provided by her custom longjohns, and having a cephalopodal passenger to boot, made flying with her backpack almost untenable. More than once she had put her suit into a tumble, and every time Oscar went crawling around, trying to get away from the strange sensations. He did not like even the gentle accelerations imparted by her suit’s jets.

Repeatedly stopping to wipe condensation from her face plate had slowed her down that much more. By trapping a few globs of water in her suit and overriding her suit’s humidity control she had managed to keep the atmosphere moist enough for Oscar, but now she was paying the price.

She had finally made it back to her scooter with a prayer on her lips and an octopus clinging to her neck.

With the photo tour complete, she was strapped into Flutterbye like a rider on a motorcycle, talking with Earth Traffic Control. Her voice sounded thick and slow inside her head. To avoid being crushed when she inflated her back bladder, Oscar had moved to one side with his tentacles wrapped around her waist. He was a squirmy belt, and apparently not at all happy with the pitch dark recesses in which he found himself.

“Flutterbye One, good readback on the engine bum. You’re cleared for launch in two hundred seconds exactly.” The space traffic controller sounded like the same man she had talked to on her way down. She was surprised when he abandoned his militarily precise diction. “But you don’t sound good, Jeanette. Are you all right?”

She explained her condition, including her fears concerning sea urchin venom.

“I understand,” Earth Traffic Control replied. “Do you want to declare an emergency?”

“No, no. I’ll be OK.”

“Then I’m declaring one for you. Flutterbye One, stay on this frequency throughout your flight. We will patch a relay if you want to report to the Seattle Aquarium. Minimize your control inputs; your vessel is go for automatic maneuvers through rendezvous with Rantoul, H.C. Save your energy for the docking, Jeanette. And good luck.”

When Flutterbye decided it was time to the launch, the initial boost was very gentle, less than a quarter standard gravity; but Oscar’s reaction surprised her. He had squirmed nervously when she tumbled her suit, but this time he crawled around in panic. Jeanette shivered at his touch and said as soothingly as she could, “You’re safe, Oscar. Don’t worry. And don’t ink. Please don’t ink.” No wonder that he was scared. This was more acceleration than he had ever experienced. He was searching for a place to hide.

The vision of where she had found him hiding in OceanLab popped into Jeanette’s mind. Frantically, she deflated her back bladder, yanked her hands inside her suit, and reached down for Oscar.

“Don’t even think about it!” she admonished the writhing octopus.

Oscar clung to her hand, braiding a few tentacles all down her arm. Maybe he’ll calm down if he can see out. Slowly, she moved him up her body. With her back bladder deflated out of the way, she could lean back to provide more room, room enough to push Oscar’s eye turret up past her neck ring. She clenched her lips tight and let him lean his leathery bag of a head against her cheek. It wasn’t as bad as she expected. He was cool to the touch and smelled of fish, but otherwise almost cuddly.

He seemed more calm then, even fascinated by the view through her faceplate. The increased airflow in her helmet might have helped; his breathing seemed less frenetic. Almost reluctantly, he released his grip from lower down and contented himself with holding loosely to her arm. “Just relax and enjoy the view,” she purred. “You’re a real space traveler now, Oscar. Welcome to the Thousand Miles High club.”

They flew the return trip to Rantoul High Colony like that, with Oscar nestled against Jeanette’s cheek while she tried to keep up a running narrative of the constellations of stars and spacecraft that came into view. Jeanette found she could not remember the names of some of the objects in the sky, names which should have been familiar to her. But Oscar did not seem to mind her lapses. He just stared out her faceplate, occasionally shifting his grip. After a while she did not even bother to move his tentacles when he searched for something more convenient to hold on to. Once she had to nudge one of his legs away when he became inquisitive about the controls for her suit’s jet pack, but only once. Oscar learned quickly what he must not touch.

“Flutterbye One, Rantoul Approach Control. Respond please. You are on a collision course. Mayday mayday mayday.” Words, fust words. Go away, words. “Flutterbye One, Rantoul Approach Control. Jeanette? Respond please. You are on a collision course. Mayday mayday mayday.”

“Wha’? Huh? Oh. Yeah. I think I passed out. Was dreamin’.” Jeanette heard someone talking with her voice. It must be her, talking to that nice old man in the Rantoul traffic control center.

“Jeanette? Thank god!” Yeah, it’s the old man. He’s nice. I like him. “We’ve been talking to your scooter, but we feared the worst. We’re not getting any biomed data from your suit.”

“Tha’s cuz’m not wearin’ any un-derpanz.” She giggled. Oscar attempted a party-whistle, but in the close confines of the space suit, he just wound up bumping her face with a tentacle. “Got m’ boyfren’ here, too. Say hello, Oxer.”

“Flutterbye One, listen carefully. You have to wake up. Your scooter is on a collision course with Rantoul. If you cannot control your craft, we will have to deflect it from its current trajectory. An empty cargo pod is ready to launch to do just that. You will be destroyed by the collision.”

“OK,” Jeanette responded dully.

“We have been talking to your scooter and have a maneuver set up. It will take you to a rendezvous point near the end cap where we can tow you in. But you must enter the execution command. Do you understand, Jeanette? Just enter the maneuver execute command.”

The old man wanted her to do something. She liked him. He wasn’t like that mean old bitch, Maisie Johnson. “Sure, I can do that. Hang on, Oxer. Here we go.”

She pushed the button. Flutterbye spun around and started hitting her. She was too tired to hit back. Oscar didn’t like it at all. He grabbed her so hard it hurt.

“Not now, Oxer. I have a headache.”

Wiping the mist from her face plate seemed like hard work; she had to concentrate on the task. The space colony loomed huge in her windows and slid past. Then it jumped. Suddenly she was looking at the South Cap freight yard, from outside.

“What’re we doin’ out here, Oxer? See that li’l door? Tha’s where we wanna be. S’OK. We’ll jus’ fly there.” It seemed like a reasonable plan. She could just park Flutterbye where it was, and fly over to the airlock on her suit jets. Methodically she unfastened her straps and climbed out of her scooter. With a kick, she propelled herself in the general direction of the space colony. Everything started spinning.

“What’s wrong with m’ fingers? Can’t feel the controls,” she observed. “This idn’t gonna work, Oxer. Lemme jus’ take a nap first. G’night.”

Oscar the octopus knew nothing of docosahexaenoic acid or what animal bodies did with it. He did know the other animals in his tiny world were generally boring. All except one, that is. The interesting one would come and visit for a few hours, but always left before he could really learn about it. And that one never came to his part of the world. There was always some kind of barrier between them. From watching the way the interesting one moved around, he had concluded the water was much less viscous on the other side of the barrier, like the bubbles he collected.

He had learned to watch through the other barriers so he would know when the interesting one would come. He liked the noises it made, rich in texture and repeated in ever-varying ways. He had learned to attach meaning to the different noises. Some referred to the other creatures in his world. Others meant the interesting one was going to do something to the strange hard-shelled fish that swam in straight lines and generally avoided everyone else. And one noise, a very special noise he loved to hear, seemed to mean the interesting one had directed its attention just toward him. None of the other creatures in Oscar’s world ever did that.

He especially liked to watch the interesting one manipulate things with its strange, hard tentacles. The creature’s body was all out of proportion—beak misplaced, small tentacles branching off big thick ones, and even smaller tentacles branching from even thicker ones. The stubby little things seemed to be worthless to it, like those lumps on its long body. It could not possibly hold anything with those lumps; they just bounced around and got in the way. Those stringy, lifeless tentacles on its head were the strangest. Usually the creature kept them tied up out of the way. Oscar tried to show the creature that he knew about such things by knotting those nasty stringies the jellyfish trailed around. Maybe if the creature saw that Oscar was interesting, too, it would stay longer. Maybe it would teach him more noises. But he could never get the point across. He had resigned himself to a life of boredom, learning what he could by playing with the other animals in his world, and gazing through the little barrier that showed him the world beyond his.

Then the big barrier broke. He was terrified and he hurt, but suddenly there was a whole new world to explore. He found the noisy places where the world beyond was stealing his water. That made sense. There was no water in the world beyond. The interesting one always put on a portable cave before going into that world. But now maybe the world beyond would fill with water and he could go there. He tried to get through one of the little holes, but it was far too small. Something in the world beyond bit off the tip of his tentacle. So he played a joke on the world beyond. He stuffed jellyfish into the holes it had made and stopped the flow of water.

The interesting one usually visited when something interesting happened. Oscar saw it coming in its portable cave. But it made the wrong noises this time, loud noises with bad melody. It was a long time before he overcame his fear of the interesting one’s strange new behavior. Eventually, though, it let him touch it. It was warm, good to touch, and more interesting than ever before. It showed him things, and he helped it pick out creatures from his world. He even gave it some of his favorites, so it would know how much he appreciated the attention he was getting.

But then the interesting one was getting ready to leave. Oscar wanted to go with it, to see the world beyond, finally, it consented to let him go in its portable cave. Sometimes it was scary, but he trusted the interesting one. He watched its every move, trying to learn how the interesting one manipulated the world beyond.

Now, after a long, exciting day, Oscar was faced with a conundrum. The interesting one had again stopped telling him about things, and there were indeed very interesting things to explore. The world was spinning around them. Every few seconds something very large would go past. And on that large thing, waving its stubby tentacles, he saw the interesting one wearing its portable cave. The interesting one could not be in two places at the same time, so he concluded this must be yet another interesting one. There might be even more of them! Maybe even as many interesting ones as there were fingerling fish!

But Oscar’s interesting one was not doing anything. Maybe it was waiting for him to do it now. It had shown him how to gather fish in tiny portable caves, and then let him do this by himself. He wanted to go to the large thing and see the other interesting one, and if he understood the noises his interesting one had made, that is what it wanted, too.

Tentatively, Oscar reached for one of the little joysticks, the one he had seen Jeanette use to stop the world from spinning. He touched it, and then looked at her. She did not brush his tentacle away, did not make protest noises, did not even expose her eyes. He pushed the stick. The world continued to spin, but in a different direction. He pushed the stick the other way, and the world slowed down. By trial and error, he learned to stop the world, and then to move it to where he wanted it to be. He looked to Jeanette for comment, but received no response.

He could see the other suited figure, but now he was even farther away from it. Jeanette had used the other stick to move things closer, so Oscar mimicked her. The other figure was coming closer now, but the world started spinning again. It took two tentacles to keep it all in balance.

Oscar was really beginning to enjoy himself when the other figure reached out for him, and suddenly he could no longer control the world around him. The next few minutes of his life were too strange to think about; he just let the wonders unfold around him and tried to take it all in without trying to analyze it.

Someone was operating some kind of machine, very close to her ear. Jeanette blinked to clear her eyes. No, it was Duke, snoring. He was lying with his mouth agape and head lolled over the back of his chair, feet propped up on a footstool. Normally Duke was clean-shaven, but now he sported a good start at a beard. She stared at him for a while, thinking he looked cute like that.

“He’s been here since he brought you in.” Jeanette slowly rolled over to face the speaker and saw Beverly, framed in the side rail of her hospital bed. She was dressed in her working duds, a practical one-piece shorts outfit in light green. Her makeup looked fresh. “It’s about time you woke up. Maybe now he’ll go back to work, so I won’t have to keep reassuring Leroy he’s not going to go bankrupt while his best technician moons over his girlfriend.”

“But I’m not—”

“Ha! So you think.”

Jeanette decided to change the subject. “How long have I been here?”

“It’ll be three weeks tomorrow. You’ve been out of it most of the time. Gonna stay awake now?”

“Yeah, I think so. But three weeks! I’d better start calling my customers!” Jeanette started to sit up, and discovered she was wired into the bed by a serpentine array of tubes and wires. Sitting up made her feel dizzy.

“Hold it sister!” Beverly said. “Just lie back and relax. You’re going to be with us for a while. If you need to call someone, use the phone by your bed; but you’ll find it’s all taken care of. All the other independents are pitching in to keep your laboratories going while you’re laid up.”

“Oh no! I’ll lose my contracts!” She tried to get up again. The dizziness was worse this time.

“Jeanette, when are you going to learn to trust people? Your friends won’t jump your contracts, and won’t let the corporations move in. Most of them would have done it for free if I hadn’t insisted they hit you up for expenses.”

“Oh.” Jeanette was surprised to hear she had friends besides Beverly and Duke. She rarely saw the other independent operators to whom Rantoul High Colony was home base, but perhaps their spirit of independence formed a stronger bond than she had realized. Of course, she would have done the same for any one of them—had done, lending a hand where she could to keep the contracts out of the hands of the corporations—but this was the first time she needed help herself. Her vulnerability was unsettling. “Will I have enough to pay my hospital bill?”

“Don’t worry about it. The Seattle Aquarium is taking care of it. They were really concerned about you. Dr. French had a big argument with Maisie Johnson about sending a rescue flight to pick you up while you were on your way back. He was willing to pay for it, but there was no trajectory solution for any of the available ships.”

“That was sweet of him, but he should have let Chipper handle it,” Jeanette said. “Dr. French is a brilliant biologist, but he just doesn’t twig to orbital mechanics.”

“That’s what Maisie said, too. Once he heard you had that octopus with you—”

“Oscar! What happened to Oscar?”

Suddenly, Duke laughed. “I was wondering when you were going remember him,” he said. Despite her concern for the octopus, Jeanette felt herself dimpling into a broad smile as she laboriously turned herself around to face him. She could see the good news on his face; he was grinning at her, waiting for her to ask.

“Well?”

Instead of answering her directly, he ceremoniously lifted the television from the side table and unfolded it. He punched a comm code into the television before handing it to her. The image looked like OceanLab as she had last seen it, vague mist and transparent balls of water floating in front of a wall of buttons and knobs. The spacesuit mounted on the wall looked like hers.

She was relieved when Beverly moved around to stand next to Duke. That way she didn’t have to keep rolling back and forth to see them both. “Mark Blevin wanted us to send him down to Seattle,” Beverly said.

Duke snorted. “No way! When I found him in your suit with you, I thought I’d keep him in a tank at the shop, but as soon as we got him into g, he just slumped to the bottom of the tank and wouldn’t budge. He’d never make it on Earth.”

“Not used to controlling his buoyancy,” Beverly explained.

“That makes sense,” Jeanette said. “He was bom in zero g, never knew anything else. But where is he?”

“Leroy partitioned off a section of his maintenance hanger up at South Cap,” Duke said. “He already had a full-video phone hookup in there. Blevin stopped his squawking when we promised to send him six hours of video a day.”

“And some blood and tissue samples,” Beverly added. “Oscar turned out to be a good patient. He doesn’t complain when you poke him; he just watches.”

“Gonna tell her about Molly?” Duke asked.

Jeanette’s raised eyebrows communicated the inquiry to Beverly.

“You missed Molly,” Beverly said. “We shipped her home yesterday. She’s a big female octopus, actually Oscar’s distant cousin. Dr. Blevin was worried about how long Oscar would live after all he’d been through, so he didn’t waste any time. Molly arrived just a couple days after you got back, first-class cargo from Seattle. I’m afraid your aquatic boyfriend is fickle, Jeanette. He had his hand up her skirt before he even said hello!”

“That’s not true!” Duke protested. “Oscar was the perfect gentlemen. He showed her how to fly in zero g—.”

“Just strutting his stuff,” Beverly said. “Showing off, buzzing around her like a rocket-powered zebra.”

“Did she answer his zebra stripes?” Jeanette asked.

“Well, yes,” Beverly said.

“Then Duke is right; he was a perfect gentleman. That’s their mating display. And he had to reach under her mantle because that’s how they do it. Oscar has two tentacles especially adapted to deposit his packet in the correct place.”

“Oh, all right,” Beverly said. “Spoil my joke, if you must. Anyhow, the aquarium got their sample. ”

“Oscar must be feeling all right if he’s still interested in females,” Jeanette said. “But I can’t see him! Where is he?”

Duke reached over to the television she was holding and switched on its pickups. “Call him.”

She called, carefully using the same tone she had used when she greeted him on regular visits to OceanLab. A whoosh came from the television—no rude noise this time; apparentiy Oscar had learned better control over his jet in air—and suddenly the screen was filled with his eye turret. Black pupil slits rimmed with swirls of gold stared back at her. A second later he backed off and party-whistled in the air with ripples of green and gray flashing along his body. He moved back into close view and patted the top of his eye turret with a tentacle tip, then curled the tentacle into a rough approximation of the letter J.

“He just said hello to you,” Duke said.

Jeanette was startled. She waved to the television and returned the greeting. “He’s all right, breathing air?” she asked.

“We were going to fill his new tank with water, but Oscar seems to like it just the way it is.”

Beverly added, “As long as he keeps his gills wet, he’s probably getting more oxygen than he would in pure water. You can tell when he’s feeling a little dry because he’ll find a water bubble and stuff it under his mantle.”

It felt so good to see Oscar alive and well, Jeanette found her eyes were misting over. She pressed her fingers against the television screen.

“His vocabulary is growing at an astounding rate,” Beverly said.

“He knows words?”

“A couple hundred at least; more every day. Mostly familiar things, water, bubbles, different kinds of fish, and names for the people he’s met. Duke taught him your name by showing him your picture and drawing your first initial on the screen. That’s when it clicked. We think he already had a rudimentary concept of language because he communicates his feelings with his color displays, and he uses his eyes and tentacles to refer to objects at hand. But when Duke showed him a symbol that referred to something that was not present—you, I mean—he twigged to the idea of words as abstractions. That same day he invented his own sign language and started teaching it to us. He talks about you all the time, but I’ve never been able to figure out what he’s saying.”

“But how could a cephalopod—”

“That’s what Dr. Blevin is so excited about,” Beverly said. “They discovered octopi were among the most intelligent creatures on Earth long ago, but what Oscar can do eclipses his terrestrial cousins.” She sighed. “I’m afraid groundhog girls like Molly will always be nothing more than sex objects to him. He couldn’t get her interested in any of the things he had to show her; all she wanted to do was hide. Like all octopi, she has the thirty-lobed brain—”

“Thirty?” Jeanette said. She kept smiling and waving to Oscar through the television screen. He responded with writhing tentacles and patches of color shifting in complex patterns.

“—Uh, huh, they use it mostly for motor control, posture, and color displays. I’ve been studying up on the material Mark Blevin sent. Oscar’s cranial lobes are much larger, way out of proportion to terrestrial octopi. Since he doesn’t have to invest so much of his mind in maintaining posture in a gravity field, he seems to pay attention to other things.”

Oscar darted away from the television, and returned seconds later with one of the maintenance bots that normally inhabited Rantoul’s zero-g caigo holds. The robot’s manipulators were missing, and the joystick controls from a space suit had been added. With a wave and a flash of yellow-green, he jetted off on the robot.

“He’s showing off again,” Beverly said.

“That’s his favorite toy. It was Leroy’s idea,” Duke explained. “Oscar didn’t want to leave your suit when we brought you in, so I just shut it down and left it in there with him. Leroy saw him playing with the controls for the suit jets, looking around as if he expected it to fly. Just as an experiment, he cobbled up that little scooter out of parts from old maintenance bots and a retired suit, and sure enough. Oscar took to it right away! It scares me the way he flies so close to things, but Leroy says he’s a natural pilot—always knows his orientation and tracks the trajectory of everything around him. The only time he has problems is when he runs out of compressed air, but at least he doesn’t crash any more. Dr. French wants us to let him try out an astrogation simulator.”

Jeanette thought about it for a second. “He might like that; it’s an extension of what he’s been doing all his life at OceanLab. Gonna do it?”

“As soon as we can move one of the simulators into his zero-g tank and seal it against the humidity. The aquarium is paying for the whole thing.”

“I want to go see him—” Again, she started to get up but found Beverly’s hand firmly planted on her breastbone.

“Oh no you don’t, girl,” Beverly said. A nervous waver beneath her stem voice betrayed the depth of her concern. “You have months of recovery ahead of you, Jeanette. You’re atrophied, decalcified, dehydrated, full of toxins, and have granulomas from sea urchin spines wandering around your body. You’re not leaving the g-field until I say you’re ready! Since Oscar can’t come to see you either, the two of you will just have to settle for visiting on television for a while. You’re in for a long vacation, so just relax and enjoy it.”

There was no choice but to accept it; Beverly was right. For the first time in her life, she had to depend on others, trust their judgment in handling her business matters and trust them to take care of her. “All right,” she said, lying back against her pillows. Oscar waved a tentacle as he sped across her television screen. “This time I’ll be good.”

Duke was not at all shy about helping Jeanette with her suit this time. As soon as he had secured the last lace of her undersuit, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him heartily.

“It’s been a long time since you’ve done this for me,” she said.

His youthful grin was as disarming as ever. “Almost a year. I remember the last time. I almost lost you then!” He waited while she finished up the laces on his undersuit. She seemed to be having trouble making her fingers work. “You’re really excited about this trip, aren’t you?”

“More than I can say. It’s so good to be going out again. All the time I was in the hospital getting transfusions, and then the months of physical therapy, I’ve thought about nothing but getting out again in my own ship. But I’ll keep my promise. I won’t go out without you, as long as you want to go.”

Duke smiled and patted her. Snuggled in his arms, she wondered how she could ever have thought of him as a boy. “It’s a deal,” he said. “Let’s see how it goes on this trip. If it’s half as much fun as you make it sound, we’re partners!”

Beverly knocked and poked her head in the door. “Everybody decent? Oops. Sorry to interrupt.”

Duke nodded to her. “S’OK, c’mon in, Bev.”

She padded in, wearing an undersuit similar to those worn by the others. “Can somebody help me with these laces? I can’t figure out where they go.” While Duke was tightening the laces, she added, “I don’t know how you talked me into this, Jeanette. I’m a colony girl now, not a spacer.”

“I didn’t talk you into it, the Seattle Aquarium did, with a nice, fat research contract. You’ve got a better chance at figuring out zero-g deconditioning than any other doctor in Earth orbit.”

“Well, thanks for putting in a good word for me, anyway.”

“You didn’t need my help. You got just the calling card you needed when you cracked the code on those enzymes that let babies develop normally in weightlessness.”

“Couldn’t have done it without the mollusks you brought back from OceanLab. But I guess the Seattle folks did all right by you, too: new contract, new ship to go with it—pressurized, even! Next thing you know they’ll be putting up a statue of you at the Pacific Science Center!”

Duke interrupted. “All right, Bev, you’re laced in. If the mutual admiration society will kindly get into their shiny new suits, we can get up to South Cap in time for our launch window.”

While she was squeezing herself into her new custom-fitted space suit, Jeanette added a thought. “It’ll be nice when Rantoul gets a pressurized docking tunnel installed at South Cap. We won’t have to put on our suits just to get out to the ship.”

“Give ’em some time,” Duke said. “It took months to get the material for a permanent zero-g dock for your new ship. Leroy and I only finished it a few weeks ago.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to sound unappreciative, Duke. I’m anxious to see it,” Jeanette said. “Is our new pilot ready for the trip?”

“More than ready,” Duke said. “He aced ground school while you were still in the hospital, and even helped design the new control station for the ship. I’ve been watching him practice rendezvous procedures since the day the new dock was finished. He’s a natural, Jeanette. You won’t find a better zero-g pilot anywhere inside the asteroid belt.”

As she was strapping herself into her seat in the Flutterbye Two, Beverly remarked, “Y’know, Jeanette, it’s a shame you can’t launch from the catapult, but I think that’s what finally made me decide to take this job. I just can’t stand that sudden drop to zero-g. Can’t even take the shuttle to Chanute without tossing my cookies all the way.”

“It’s a small price to pay,” Jeanette said. “The F-Two doesn’t need the boost, and for the price of a few extra kilos of fuel we get the best pilot in the Galaxy!” She looked toward the forward control station. There was some condensation at the comers of a transparent partition around the control station, but she could clearly see the pilot within.

The pilot turned around from his console and beamed at them with his molten gold cat’s eyes. He spoke, tentacles flying over the keys of a model ninety-four Hawking voice encoder. “Why, thank you, Jeanette! Now, as soon as you lumpy humans are ready, we’ll launch Flutterbye Two on her maiden voyage. Destination: OceanLab!”

Content

Fish Tank
by Gregory Bennett