It was easy to see why his clumsy fishing had never hooked any big fish. These creatures and the Swarmers had teeth for a reason. There were many of them in the oceans now and they had to feed on something.

They leaped and leaped and leaped again. Their fore-fins wriggled in flight. The fins separated into bony ridges at their edge and rippled quickly. Each ridge made a stubby projection. The rear fins were the same. They smacked the water powerfully and filled the air with so much spray that he could see a rainbow in one of the fine white clouds.

Just as suddenly they were gone.

Warren waited for them to return. After a while he licked his lips and sat down. He began to think of water without wanting to. He had caught some rain in his mouth the night before but it was little. When the waves were washing the deck he had been forced to stop because the salt water would set him back even though it would have felt good to drink it along with the rain.

He had to catch a Swarmer. He wondered if the Skimmers drove them away. To catch an ordinary fish would be a little help, but the ones out here did not give much liquid even when you squeezed the flesh and anyway he had only two lines now and the small shrimp for bait. He needed a Swarmer.

In the afternoon he saw a rippling to the east but it passed going north. The high, hard glare of the sun weighed on him. Nothing tugged at his lines. The mast traced an ellipse in the sky as the waves came. The current ran strong.

A white dab of light caught his eye. It was a blotch on the flat plane of the sea. It came steadily closer. He squinted.

Canvas. Under it was a blue form tugging at a corner. Warren hauled it aboard and the alien leaped high, showering him, the bony head slanted to bring one of the big elliptical white eyes toward the figure on the deck. The Skimmer plunged, leaped again, and swam away fast, taking short leaps.

Warren studied the soggy, bleached canvas. It looked like a tarp used to cover the gun emplacements on the Manamix but he could not be sure. There were copper-rimmed holes along one edge. He used them to hoist it up the mast, lashing it with wire and punching new holes to fasten the boom. He did not have enough lines to get it right but the canvas filled with the quickening breeze of late afternoon.

He watched the bulging canvas and patiently did not think about his thirst. A splash of spray startled him. A Skimmer—the same one?—was leaping next to the raft.

He licked his swollen lips and thought for a moment of fetching the gaff and then put the idea away. He watched the Skimmer arc and plunge and then speed away. It went a few tens of meters and then leaped high and turned and came back. It splashed him and then left and did the same thing again.

Warren frowned. The Skimmer was heading southwest. It cut a straight line in the shifting waters.

To keep that heading he would need a tiller. He tore up a plank at the raft edge and lashed a pole to it. Fashioning a collar that would seat in the deck was harder. He finally wrapped strips of bark firmly into a hole he had punched with the gaff. They held for a while and he had to keep replacing them. The tiller was weak and he could not turn it quickly for fear of breaking the lashing. It was impossible to perform any serious maneuver like coming about if the wind shifted, but the sunset breeze usually held steady, and anyway he could haul down the canvas if the wind changed too much. He nodded. It would be enough.

He brought the bow around on the path the Skimmer was marking. The current tugged him sideways and he could feel it through the tiller, but the raft steadied and began to make a gurgle where it swept against the drift. The canvas filled.

The clouds were fattening again and he hoped there would not be another storm. The raft was weaker and the boards creaked with the rise and fall of each wave. He would not last an hour if he had to cling to a log in the water.

A heavy fatigue settled in him.

The sea was calming, going flat. He scratched his skin where the salt had caked and stung. He slitted his eyes and looked toward the sunset. Banks of clouds were reflected in the ocean that now at sunset was like a lake. Waves made the image of the clouds into stacked bars of light. Pale cloud, then three washes of blue, then rods of cloud again. The reflection made light seem bony, broken into beams and angles. Square custard wedges floated on the glassy skin. He looked up the empty sky, above the orange ball of sun, and saw a thin streak of white. At first he tried to figure out how this illusion was made, but there was nothing in optics that would give a line of light that jutted upward, rather than lying horizontal. It was no jet or rocket trail. It thickened slightly as it rose up into the dark bowl of the sky.

After describing it to himself this way Warren then knew what it had to be. The Skyhook. He had forgotten the project, had not heard it mentioned in years. He supposed they were still building it. The strand started far out in orbit and lowered toward the Earth as men added to it. It would be more years before the tip touched the air and began the worst part of the job. If they could lower it through the miles of air and pin it to the ground, the thing would make a kind of elevator. People and machines would ride up it and into orbit and the rockets would not streak the sky anymore. Warren had thought years ago about trying to get a job working on the Skyhook, but he knew only how engines worked and they did not use any of that up there, nothing that needed air to burn. It was a fine thing where it caught the sun like a spider thread. He watched it until it turned red against the black and then faded as the night came on.

Two

He woke in the morning with the first glow of light. His left arm was crooked around the tiller to hold it even though he had moored it with a wire. The first thing he checked was the heading. It had drifted some and he sat up to correct it and then found that his left arm was cramped. He shook it. It would not loosen so he gave it a few minutes to come right while he unlashed the tiller and brought them around to the right bearing. He was pretty sure he knew the setting even though he could feel that the current had changed. The raft cut across the shallow waves more at this new angle. Foam broke over the deck and the swell was deeper and the planking groaned but he held to it.

The left arm would not uncramp. The cold of the night and sleeping on it had done this. He hoped the warmth later would loosen the muscles though he knew it was probably because his body was not getting enough food or the right food. The arm would just have to come loose on its own. He massaged it. The muscles jumped under his right hand and after a while he could feel a tingling all down the arm although that was probably from rubbing the salt in, he knew.

There was nothing on his lines. He drew in the bait but it had been nibbled away. He kept himself busy gathering seaweed with the gaff and resetting the lines with the weed but he knew it was not much use and he was trying to keep his mind off the thirst. It had been bad since he woke up and was getting worse as the sun rose. He searched for the Skyhook to take his mind off his throat and the raw puffed-up feel in his mouth but he could not see it.

He checked the bearing whenever he remembered it but there was a buzzing in his head that made it hard to tell how much time had passed. He thought about the Swarmers and how much he wanted one. The Skimmers were different but they had left him here now and he was not sure how much longer he could hold the bearing or even remember what the bearing was. The steady hollow slap of the waves against the underside of the raft soothed him and he closed his eyes against the sun.