Friday Indigo said, “What the hell is all that? Rombelle, I thought this thing was supposed to be a translator.”

“It is, sir. But with a language it has never heard before, the translator needs a sample before it can begin to translate.”

“So what did it do with my message?”

“I don’t know, sir. I don’t think it did anything. It needs a sample of their speech first.”

“How big a sample?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s no answer. Why didn’t you warn me, before you let me come out here and make a fool of myself? I want to know about this planet, and all I get are a bunch of nonsense sounds.”

“Just a moment, sir.” Bony could see the slits on the side of the body opening and closing again. “I believe the Limbics don’t use their mouths for speech.”

“So what are they doing, farting at us?”

“No, sir. They use gill slits. One of them is going to talk again.”

The translator produced another string of gurgles. This time it went on for almost a minute. Gradually the sounds modulated into something with the cadences of human speech.

“Can you understand that, Rombelle?”

“No, sir.”

“Nor can I. Liddy, give me that thing.” Indigo grabbed the translator from her and shook it violently. “Goddam heap of junk. It’s not working. If I could get my hands on the assholes who sold it to me, I’d gut and garrotte them. I paid a lot for this worthless piece of crap.”

It occurred to Bony that if Indigo’s speech was still being recorded, this was going to make an interesting entry in the annals of first-contact history.

“It is working, sir. The translator sounded more like human speech toward the end. Just keep talking.”

“About what? I can’t have a one-way conversation with these stupid blobs.”

The translator, unexpectedly, whistled and said “Globs of blobs.”

“Hear that, sir? Greet them again.”

“Right.” Indigo returned the translator to Liddy, struck a pose, and said, “Greetings, people of Limbo — damn it, the bubble heads surely don’t call their own planet that . It’s your fault, Rombelle, giving this place such an asinine name and getting us all thinking of it like that — anyway, where was I? I, Friday Indigo, captain of the Mood Indigo , come in peace to your world, whatever you call it, and wish you well in the name of humans and whoever. There. That should do it.”

The Limbics appeared to be listening attentively. Their spokesman’s gill slits opened, and after a few moments of silence the translator gurgled and said, “The second walking makes it new after four braces. Next water will open the lonely day for gold.”

“Damn and set fire to it, I told you it was a piece of junk. Are you going to tell me that you could understand that?”

“No, sir.”

“It was gibberish.”

“Perhaps it needs a larger sample.” But Bony was not convinced. He had seen translation machines perform successfully after unbelievably small samples of languages. Of course, that was for human languages. “Sir, I’m not sure this is going to work.”

“Of course it’s not working, you dummy. Didn’t you hear what it said?”

“I mean the translator may never work, no matter how big a language sample we give it.”

“It was sold to me as a general translator.”

“Between pairs of human languages. Maybe it even works with Tinker and Pipe-Rilla talk. But no one has ever had to deal with an intelligent marine organism before. The concepts that the Limbics evolved to deal with may be just too strange to translate.”

Unfortunately, Bony didn’t believe that. The gill slits were moving, and the translator said, “Is it Monday for the flower, or was it the one at the end?” But at the same time, the Limbics as a group were steadily backing away while still facing Liddy and Indigo. The bubble arms were repeating the signal they had given earlier. Come. We want you to come .

“You’re full of it, Rombelle. I tell you, it’s this crappy machine.” Friday Indigo took the translator from Liddy and dropped it to the seabed. “Concepts too strange to translate, my ass. Look at them. It’s clear enough what they mean. They want us to follow them. Come on, Liddy. And Rombelle, you stay here and look after the ship.”

“Sir, I don’t think that going with them is a good idea.”

“Did you hear me ask your opinion?”

“But we won’t be able to communicate with each other when you’re more than a few meters away.”

“How awful. Do you think I can’t manage without the benefit of your advice? You’ll find out what we learn when we get back.”

Liddy spoke for the first time since leaving the ship. “Don’t worry about us, Bony. We’ll be fine.”

“Enough of the soft talk.” Indigo went to Liddy’s side and took hold of the arm of her suit. “Let’s go. They’re waiting for us.”

The Limbics had formed into a circle around the two humans. They began a slow and steady movement across the seabed, ushering Liddy and Friday Indigo away toward the undersea ridge. The water was less clear today, and in just a couple of minutes the group of figures was merging into a cloudy blue-green haze.

Bony watched until they were invisible. He had stayed on board the ship in case an emergency affected the other two and he needed to perform a rescue. But Friday Indigo, coddled from birth, would not recognize an emergency if he saw one. To know danger for what it was, you first needed experience with fear. Bony had that, if he had anything. But how would he know if an emergency had arisen, with the others out of sight and the water preventing radio contact? He had to put himself in a position where he could save Liddy.

He gave the command to reel in the cable attached to the translator and tuck it away in a cargo hold, and turned the unit off.

It was time to try an experiment that he had been thinking about in every free moment of the past twenty-four hours. With the others out of harm’s way, the only person he could hurt was himself.

Bony slipped on a suit, left the helmet open but in a position where he could snap it closed in a fraction of a second, and went across to the main control desk of the Mood Indigo . He already knew that the ship’s fusion drive could not be used underwater. The auxiliary ion thrusters ought to work, though. They could provide thrust for very long periods, but they had low power. They were designed only for small adjustments to position in space, and they could never lift a ship into orbit.

They might, however, be enough for what Bony had in mind. He knew the total mass of the ship, and he had calculated how much water it displaced. From that he could estimate the average density of the Mood Indigo as about fifteen percent more than the density of water. On Earth, that would mean the auxiliary thrusters would have to lift a lot of weight. Here, however, the heavy-water ocean of Limbo provided considerable extra buoyancy.

He could have deduced that fact without calculation, from the sedate and gentle descent of the ship in their first arrival. The question remained, just how much extra lift did the denser water provide?

He had gone as far as calculation would permit. Now he had to make the practical test.

Bony keyed in the command to provide aft thrust at a minimal level. There was a slight vibration through the ship, the view outside the ports vanished in a cloud of gray silt stirred up from the sea floor, and nothing else happened. The ship’s inertial navigation system showed that the Mood Indigo had not risen a centimeter.

A slightly higher setting produced a similar lack of result. Bony added thrust in slow increments, waiting each time to make sure that the situation had stabilized. On the fifth increase he felt a different tremor in the ship. A silt cloud still obscured the view outside the ports, but the inertial navigator indicated that the ship was rising, slowly and vertically.