Or was it he who was different, he who hadn't been trained in the hard school of this sort of seamanship? A man who'd won his papers in passenger service wasn't wanted aboard a floating cannery. Kort wished he had known a month ago how it would be. He should have left Venus after being discharged from the Corinthia, instead of trying to start anew in the cannery service.
His clenched fist opened.
"Break out a magnetic!" The deck speakers amplified his voice to stentorian volume, galvanized the crew into sullen action. Men untangled the steel, spliced a new length to it, and swung the magnetic grapple over the side.
With the grapple magnets drawing two hundred amps, the ship swung in a clumsy circle. Half an hour passed, marked only by the screech of cannery boilers popping off every five minutes. From forward came the stench of cleaning platforms, the "clop-plop" of trimming machinery.
Then the rain, pelting down in drops big as grapes. They splashed roaringly upon the deck, drummed upon the wheelhouse windows like furious fingers. The Mermaid seemed to squat lower in the water under the weight of the storm.
Abruptly a red lamp flashed. Kort was out of the pilot house almost before the engine room, answering his signal, had reversed the turbines. In helmet and plaskon overalls he fought his way aft.
At the stern rail Kort watched the cable come in, dripping steel curl itself over the drums. Finally the grapple broke the frothy surface of the sea. To it clung the lost net, and Kort felt a moment of amazed gratitude for that bit of luck. For once the Mermaid had been fortunate. Ships sometimes spent hours in futile grappling.
Tenders seized the net, spread it as the winch hauled in. It was nine tenths up when Kort, watching for anything that might jam the rollers, signaled the winch-man to stop.
The thing might have been a giant slug. Thick as a man's arm, it was so entangled in the net that any estimate of its length was sheer guesswork. One end tapered to a featureless snout, the other flattened to a broad, finned tail. Its color was a dingy, bloodless white. Kort had never seen anything like it before.