No one congratulated Crat for saving his drowning crewmate. Nobody spoke much about the incident at all. Things happen, was the philosophy. So there were a few more widows back on one of the floating towns? Too bad. Life was short; what more could you say? Still, Crat apparently wasn’t a “go-suck Yankee sof-boy” anymore. There were no more sour looks at mess, or strange objects found swimming in his gruel. Silently, they moved his hammock out of the steamy hold and up to the anchor room with the others.

Only one fellow actually commented on the misadventure with the fishing net. “Jeez, Vato,” he told Crat. “I never seen no bugger hold breath so long as you!”

To Crat, who had no idea how long he’d been underwater, the remark seemed like a signal from Providence. An experience that might have turned some men away from swimming forever, instead pointed him to an unexpected talent.

The story of his life had been mediocre plainness at best, and all too often less than that. His image of himself was slow and thick as a stone. The thought of having any unusual abilities astonished Crat. And so, at the very moment he had won acceptance aboard the Congo, he renewed his vow to leave first chance — to act on his earlier loose talk about going into salvage.

Not that there was much he’d miss about this old tub. Life on a frontier didn’t offer many luxuries. Forced to live here for a week, the average American would never again complain about his own restricted water ration, which in some states topped a lavish hundred gallons a week.

Or take another necessity — Data-Net privileges. Here you simply didn’t have them.

Crat used to despise old folks back in Indiana for relying on so many electronic crutches… globe-spanning access to news on every topic, to every library, to every dumpit research journal even, instantly translated from any obscure language for mere pennies. Then there were the hobby lines, special interest groups, net-zines, three-vee shows.

Until emigrating, Crat never realized how much he depended on all that, too. Aboard Congo, though, they had this strange, once-a-day ritual — mail call. Each man answered if his name was shouted, and swapped a black cube with the bosun. You were allowed to pipe two message blips, no more than fifty words each, through the ship’s single antenna, ruled dictatorially by the comm officer, a one-eyed, one-legged victim of some past oceanic catastrophe, whom everybody, even the captain, treated with utter deference.

Standing in line, waiting humbly for your miserable blips, was almost as humiliating as evening vitamin call, when a bored U.N. nurse doled each man his pressed capsule of “Nutritional Aid” — the sum total of the world’s sense of obligation to the pariah state of refugees. No wonder the great powers were even less generous with the world’s true lifeblood, information.

Now and then, during mail call, Crat caught himself wondering why Remi and Roland never wrote to him. Then he remembered with a sudden jerk. They’re dead. I’m the last. Last of the Quayle High Settlers.

Strange. Believing he was destined for a short life, Crat had long ago decided to live one with no compromises. He’d always been the one getting into jams, which his friends always reliably, sensibly got him out of.

Now Remi and Roland were gone, while he still lived. Who could figure it?

Roland, for some reason, had willed Crat his bank balance, augmented by a hero’s bonus. There was supposed to be a medal, too. It was probably still out there somewhere, following him around the world in the unreliable tangle of real-matter post. As for Roland’s money… Crat had blown it all in card games and buying rounds of drinks to his friends’ memory. But he did want the medal.

After mail call, off-duty crew retired to the aft deck, where three enterprising Annamese sold a pungent home brew from clay pots. While the flotilla sailed southward from the debacle with the green raiders, Crat discovered he could now stomach the foul-smelling beer. It was a milestone that showed he was adapting.

The evening was dark, with a heavy overcast cutting off most of the stars. A pearly opalescence in the west became a blaze whenever the clouds parted briefly to spill moonlight across the smooth water.

At the fantail, two sets of meditators seemed to square off for a silent, contemplative showdown. Sufis on the portside and neo-Zen adepts to starboard. Beginners in both groups were wired to brain-wave monitors the size of thimbles, which led to earplug button speakers. Using identical, inexpensive techno-aids, each side nevertheless claimed it was true tradition, while the other taught mere dazing. Whatever. Like the majority of the crew, Crat preferred more honest, traditional forms of intoxication.

“… Commodore bloody misreads his charts—” someone said in the darkness beyond the rear hatch. “That El Nino thing… It’s’pozed drive all them fish over here Wes’ Pacific side, every ten-’leven year so. But bloody dammit commodore, he miss them sure.”

“It come more often than every ten year now, I hear,” someone else replied. Idly, Crat wondered who they were. Their English was better than average for this barge.

“Dey got de eco-loggy all fucked sure,” said someone with a Caribbean accent. “Evryt’ing all change. So I say don’t listen to UNEPA bastards, not at all. Dey don’ know no’t’ing better than we do.”

Someone else agreed. “Ach, UNEPA. They wants us dead, just like greeners do, ’cause we mess up they stinking planet. Might catch wrong type dumpit fish. Ooh, bad thing! So better we just die. Maybe put something in vitamins. Do us cheap an’ quiet.”

That was the steady gossip of course, even when Sea State chemists — university-trained men and women from lands now drowned under the rising tides — went from boat to boat reassuring crews and urging them to take the pills, rumors nevertheless spread like viruses. Crat himself sometimes wondered. His tiredness no doubt came mostly from hard work. That probably also explained the low ebb of his sex drive. But if he ever did find out somebody was slipping something into the food…

The old rage flickered momentarily and he tried to nurse it. But it just damped out, ebbing of its own accord. He lifted his head to glance over Congo’s prow at the night lights of the floating town, up ahead. The old Crat would have already been pacing — eager to prowl the red-light district or find a good brawl. Now all he could think of were the clean if threadbare sheets of the transients’ barracks and then tomorrow’s visit to the meat market.

“Ah, I find you at last. Sorry. I was lost.”

Crat looked up. It was his new friend, the elderly Zuricher, Peter Schultheiss. Peter’s was the one face Crat would miss when he transferred off this misbegotten tub. He grinned and held out a full jar. “Got you another beer, Peter.”

“Goot. Thanks. Took me some time to find my notebook with the name of my comrade at the market. But I found.” He held up a heavy black volume. To Crat’s surprise, it wasn’t a cheap store-and-write plaque, such as even the poorest deckhand owned, but a binder fat with paper pages! Schultheiss murmured as he flipped the scratchy sheets. “Let’s see. He’s in here somewhere. This fellow should, if you mention my name, be able to get you jobs in salvage… maybe training for the deep-sea work you so desire. Ah, here, let me write it down for you.”

Crat accepted the slip of paper. Nearing his rendezvous with the recruiters, he had grown a little less sure he really wanted to try nodule mining — diving far below the reach of light encased in a slimy bubble, sifting mud for crusty lumps. Though well paid, such men tended to have short lives. The alternative of shallow dredging in drowned villages was beginning to sound attractive after all.