The meeting broke up. Bob went home without any attempt to adjust his bicycle, and he was late getting the rest Seever had recommended because Daphne was on hand.

After she went to bed he updated his parents on progress, but omitted any mention of the bicycle incident. The Hunter spent the night on biochemical work which might or might not have been useful; Bob did not have the joint pains in the morning. Seever's re-port apparently accomplished something, for the Hunter and his host spent the day in the refinery watching dials and turning valves. The work wasn't too hard. Bob's muscles held out to get him back to the doctor's in the late afternoon.

And Jenny's idea was of the sort one kicks one'sself for not thinking of earlier.

8. Routine, Modified

It may not have been completely safe, but for the Hunter it was quite comfortable. A foot-and-a-half length of three-inch pipe had been secured with wire to one side of the concrete outer case of the metal-detector. A wooden plug closed the upper end of the pipe. The inner side of the plug held a small improvised electric switch, which closed the circuit in a two-strand wire leading upalong the rope which supported everything. The Hunter could send buzzer signals to those above, though they had no direct communication with him so far.

The bottom of the pipe was open, allowing the alien to look down with an eye composed of his own tissue. It was planned to make an artificial one for him from a lens and a short cylinder of opaque material, but this had not yet been completed. It would have advantages; the Hunter's flesh was not completely transparent, so that it did not make a particularly, and was not completely opaque so that his "eye" did not exclude stray light really well. He could see, but generally preferred other eyes to his own.

The bottom was very irregular, and the coral growing from it was even more so, so he had to keep sending "up" and "down" signals to the people above. The most inconvenient part of the setup was the fact that the phones of the detector were also up in the boat, and there was no convenient way for Bob and Jenny to let the Hunter know when the device responded. They had tried tying a string to a washer held in the Hunter's tissue inside the pipe, but there were so many spurious signals from the boat's own motion that this had been given up. Bob had suggested a flashlight bulb in the pipe, operated by a key in the boat through a separate circuit, but this had not yet been built.

Over a week had passed since Jenny's suggestion had been made. Between work and weather, very few hours had been spent in actual search. The vague beginnings of amap of the sea's bottom beyond the reef existed, but filled a very small fraction of the master sheet which Arthur Kinnaird had made, from the company map of the reef itself.

Checking the position of the boat every minute or two in order to keep track of the area which had been covered was a major nuisance, even though a brain-storming session in which all had participated one evening had resulted in a fairly rapid fix technique based on horizontal angles measured between corners of selected pairs of the tanks in the lagoon. The Hunter would buzz a number whenever he saw a fairly distinctive feature, and note its details with a piece of pencil graphite on a sheet of paper lining the pipe; at the sound of the buzz, those in the boat would measure and record position. During the evenings of days when they managed to work at all, the Hunter and Bob would correlate the sets of records, and make the appropriate additions to the main chart. There was a good deal of metal on the bottom; human beings seemed to have a tendency to lose things overboard. So far, all the specimens had been too small to give signals which could possibly be from a spaceship, except for one which had been found the first hour of operation. Checking it out had been long and complicated; the word had not reached the Hunter until the kayak had pulled into North Beach for rest and lunch. Afterward the site had to be found again, and the Hunter lowered to the bottom so that he could extend a pseudopod into the mud to analyze the object. It had proved to be a well-rusted, extremely large anchor. All the Hunter could do was buzz "no" to his crew. When he gave them the details later, they guessed it had been lost from a sailing ship at least a century before, possibly while trying to hold off the reef during a storm.

Procedures were gradually improved as the days went on, but the charted area increased with painful slowness. There was no real danger, though the Hunter was constantly beset by very small fish and arthropods. Biochemically his tissues were Earthlike enough to be digestible by Earth organisms, and conversely; it was something of a race every hour he was in the water to see who ate more of whom. Because of the protection of the pipe, the Hunter was able to keep ahead, but he realized how lucky he had been to meet and occupy the shark so soon after his crash beside the island.

For Bob, the days were not going very badly; fate seemed to be holding its fire for the moment. He had not suffered the strange fatigue for nearly two weeks, either because of or in spite of Seever's and the Hunter's combined efforts there was no way to tell. To forestall any complacency, the weariness had been re-placed by the joint pains in more serious form, and, after a few days, by muscle aches and cramps. The cramps were usually in the legs and waist, and some-times he was finding it difficult to conceal them from his fellow workers; they struck suddenly and without warning. Malmstrom, whom he saw at times, made

occasional remarks about his old friend's deteriorated condition but didn't seem to mean them too seriously

so far.

The PFI work had been a nuisance mostly because of the time it demanded. Bob liked it well enough for it's own sake, and even the Hunter was interested. Jenny had suggested that she take the Hunter out during Bob's work hours, accompanied either by her own father or Bob's, but the Hunter had firmly vetoed this. It was bad enough, from the alien's viewpoint, to leave his host for a few hours at a time even when they remained near each other and could rejoin on a few minutes notice. If they were apart by the three or four miles which separated the search area from the refinery, he would not even know if he was needed for perhaps hours.

About the fifth day of actual search-as Seever had predicted, wind permitted their operation much less than half the time, and they had met with no success in borrowing a powered craft-a problem which no one had seriously considered developed, to show that any separation at all of host and symbiont could lead

to trouble.

It was about half an hour before sunset. The Hunter had been rather pitying the boring time his young friends must be having, in contrast to his own, when the situation changed abruptly.

The Hunter was several seconds realizing what had happened. The motions of the boat were always providing some vertical acceleration, and no shock or blow accompanied the parting of the rope. It just quietly let go, and the detector and the Hunter were on their way to the bottom. There was a slight jolt as the wire took the load. This, surprisingly, held, jerking the wooden plug out of the top of the pipe and taking the switch and almost taking some of the alien's tissue with it. By the time he had recovered from this surprise, he and the detector were half buried in slimy mud.

Three and a half fathoms above, consternation reigned. Bob had been holding the rope while Jenny held position with the paddle, but she knew almost as soon as he did what had happened. Small as the loss was, its disappearance had altered the trim of the kayak, and the girl knew her craft very well indeed.