"In a sense," said the captain. "I just emptied the pump back into the air, ignored the bubbles, repositioned the tanks, put spin on the ship and then ladled the liquid back into the tanks with a bucket."
"Didn't you bump into a lot of the bubbles and get yourself dunked a good deal while you were working with the tanks?"
He shrugged. "I couldn't say. By that time I was ignoring them. It was that or suicide. I had begun to get the feeling that they were stalking me. So I drew a blank."
"Then after that you were all right, except for the tedium of moving the lights around?" I asked him. I answered myself at once. "No. There must be more. You haven't told me why you hid out in the bathroom, yet."
"Not yet," said Captain Hannah. "Like you, I figured I had the situation fairly well under control, but like you, I hadn't thought things through. The plastic membranes hadn't torn when we brought the tanks in board the Delta Crucis. It never occurred to me to hunt around for the reasons for the change. But I wouldn't have had long to hunt anyway, because in a few hours the reasons came looking for me.
"They were a tiny skeeter-like thing. A sort of midge or junior grade mosquito. They had apparently been swimming in the water during their larval stage. Instead of making cocoons for themselves, they snipped tiny little pieces of plastic to use as protective covers in the pupal stage. I guess they were more like butterflies than mosquitoes in their habits. And now they were mature.
"There were thousands and thousands of them, and each one of them made a tiny, maddening whine as it flew."
"And they bit? That explains your bumps?" I asked sympathetically.
"Oh, no. These things didn't bite, they itched. And they got down inside of everything they could get down inside, and clung. That included my ears and my eyes and my nose.