I wondered suddenly why my mind was wandering off in that direction — after all, my plan might be a little deceitful, but it was in a good cause, and my conscience was clear enough — and got back to immediate problems.

Details, of course, would still have to wait. I’d have to learn the local geography, especially the way to Marie’s submarine. I’d have to find out just how much freedom of action I was going to be allowed. Bert seemed to come and go at will, but he’d been here for a year. In that connection, probably I’d be expected to earn my living in some fashion; if finding out the details I needed, and working up a plan to

get Marie and me back to the surface, all took very long then I’d probably have to do something of the sort. What sort of work would be both useful down here and within my powers was something else for the future to tell.

Right now, then, the thing to do was wait for Ber1, or send for him, and give him the word. Waiting would probably be better. There was no point in looking too eager. He’d said he’d be around often, and no doubt had been while I was asleep. He’d be bound to expect me to wake up before long.

I waited, like a monkey in a zoo — or perhaps more like a fish in an aquarium.

It was about half an hour before he showed up. He glanced in through one of the ports, saw that I was conscious and picked up the writing pad.

“Been doing any thinking?” was his opener. I nodded affirmatively.

“Good. Made up your mind?”

“I think so,” I called back. ‘I — ‘ I hesitated. Part of it was for effect, but part of it was genuine uncertainty. I could be wrong in so many ways. Then I stiffened up.

“I’m staying.”

He looked a little surprised and started to write. I went on before he had finished. ‘At least, I’m staying if you can tell me one thing for certain.”

He cleared his pad and looked at me expectantly.

“Do you genuinely believe — I’m not asking do you know, just do you believe — that these people are justified in keeping out of the power net and the rationing system?”

Bert’s face took on an annoyed expression as he wrote.

“I told you you’d have to make up your mind by yourself. I won’t take the responsibility.”

“I expect to make it up myself,” I retorted, ‘but not without data. You say there’s too little time for you to tell me everything I’d like to know, and I’m arguing that. I’m asking for a conclusion of yours, not even a piece of information you’re not supposed to give me, just a conclusion — an opinion — as a summary of information I can’t get. Did you make your decision on as little knowledge as I have now?” He shook his head negatively.

“Then I’m sorry if you read my question as a reflection on your morals, but I still want an answer.”

He frowned thoughtfully for half a minute or so and looked at me a little doubtfully. I repeated my question, to be sure he understood.

“I really do believe they have the right idea,” he wrote at last. I nodded.

“All right, then I’m staying. How long will it take to get me out of this coconut shell?”

“I don’t know.” His writing was slow and interrupted by pauses for thought. ‘It’s not what you’d call a standard procedure. We’re more used to our guests coming in submarines, which have pressure locks or at least some sort of port. I’ll tell the Council, and we’ll hunt up some engineers who have time to spare, I’m sure it can be done.”

“You mean — you mean it may take a long time? Suppose it takes longer than my air supply?”

“Then I suppose we’ll just have to shove you outdoors anyway. If you still want to badly enough, you can always come back in a sub, the way Marie did. I’ll go start things moving.”

“But why didn’t you mention this before? I thought — well — ‘

“Some things really shouldn’t need mentioning. Where in the world would you expect to find ready-made equipment for taking a man out of a high-pressure escape shell while it was still in a high-pressure environment? Think it over.” He put down the pad and was gone before I could think of a good answer to that one.

In fact he had come back, nearly an hour later, before I could think of one. I still haven’t.

Bert, on his return, had better news than I had been afraid he might. The Council, or such of them as he had found — I was getting an idea that it was a body of rather fluid composition, and that the usual way of getting things done officially was to find and deal with one’s own chosen quorum of members — had approved my application for citizenship, if it could be called that, with no argument. Several engineers in the group had been interested enough in the problem I represented to go to work on it at once. They were at the task now and might be expected to come up with something shortly.

That was encouraging. I’m an engineer of sorts myself, though I work at it only in its incidental connection with my main job, and every idea I had thought of ran into a blank wall. This was usually a matter of basic procedure. I couldn’t see how welding, or high-speed drilling, or any of several other ordinary operations you take for granted in machining and handling work could be done in a liquid environment under a pressure of more than a ton to the square inch. Most tools, for example, have high-speed motors; high-speed motors are a little hard to conceive with their moving parts bathed in an even moderately viscous fluid; and under that sort of pressure, how do you keep the fluid out?

Of course, if these people had been down here the eighty years or so that Bert had mentioned, they should have learned the basic tricks for the environment, just as men had learned space engineering the hard way. I wished I knew how they were going about my problem, though.

I didn’t find out in detail, but it didn’t take them too long. About eighteen hours — a very boring eighteen hours — after Bert had brought the news, he came back with a team of helpers and began moving the tank. It was quite a trip. We went back outside and traveled half a mile or so to another, larger entrance. Inside it there were several large corridors, instead of just one, opening from the main chamber.

They towed me down one of these for a distance and stopped by a pair of the first genuine locks I had seen since my arrival.

One was quite ordinary, and I barely glanced at it; the other was circular and just about large enough for my tank. It was located in the same wall as the smaller lock, about twenty yards away from it. It was opened as we approached by a couple of the party who swam on ahead, and the tank was juggled through. The wall in which the door was hung turned out to be several feet thick, and the door itself but little thinner; I judged that the room beyond was the one to be depressurized.

The chamber itself was fairly large. One side was crowded with apparatus, the most recognizable items being an operating table with broad restraining straps and a set of remote-control hands much finer than I was used to seeing on work subs.

The larger part of the room, in which the tank had been placed, was almost bare, and it looked very much as though the operating room had originally been much smaller. There were signs that a wall as thick as the one I had come through had been removed from between the spot where I now was and the place where the table and its auxiliary gear stood. I would have liked to see the tools that had done the job.

My guess, as it turned out, was correct; the smaller section had been the original conversion room; the smaller lock leading into it could be connected to the hatch of a visiting sub. The whole trouble had been that my tank had no hatch; it normally opened by bisection.