The Murderer clenched his hand. He could feel the tendons and imagine the wonderfully intricate nerves of his living hand. He'd been frightened many times under the sea. Occasionally divers talked about which way they'd rather go. Nitrogen narcosis was popular among the heavy drinkers. Barney's choice—a nice close mine explosion because it would be so quick. They thought the Murderer was crazy when he said he'd rather be eaten by a Great White Shark than smashed by some miserable explosive gadget.
"Now I'm spreading two wires apart," Barney said calmly, "but I've left a layer of gelatin around each of them. I will not cut the wires and I'll try not to let them touch each other."
Gradually his head and shoulders disappeared up into the gelatinous mass.
"Don't snag your tanks or regulator on a wire," the Murderer breathed.
"Now I'm cutting within a few inches of the base of the can." Only Barney's kicking legs showed. "My air is filling the cut—and I'm going—to open a—chimney." Bubbles emerged from the side of the swaying mass.
"Suppose this thing is atomic," the Murderer said. "It would crush our ballistic missile sub from here."
"This is peacetime, boy. Nobody's fool enough to let an atomic mine go drifting around with the ice."
The Murderer looked down at the hard metal shell of the minisub. You could blast and smash it, and it would still be metal. You even could vaporize it, and its atomic particles would be somewhere—or changed into energy—but nothing really lost, because it had never been alive. The Murderer thought of the commander's two kids waking from their naps. It had taken life two billion years to get that far, and it all could be lost. Right now, was Barney committing aggressive action?
He thought again of that orientation class where they theoretically learned how to disarm an unexploded atomic depth charge. He had expressed his feeling that these atomic charges were murder. The fools had laughed and begun calling him Murderer.
"The bottom of this can is as blank," Barney said, "as a sailor in one of those modern art museums. I'm going to cut my way along the side of the can and see what I can see."