Through the Eye of a Needle (n-2) by Hal Clement

Author:Hal Clement [Clement, Hal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_space

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.

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