Putting one hand about a foot above the other he began to count to himself, hoping that his counts were about a second apart. For every count he put his hand up what he judged to be another foot in distance. Then he realized that his legs were unconsciously starting to twine themselves around the cable, and he pulled them away, holding his body straight up and down a short distance away from the escape line.
“That’s funny,” he told himself. “I guess I always twined my legs around a rope when I was going down it, so I want to do the same thing going up.”
He looked up again quickly and saw legs kicking above him. That would be the pharmacist pulling away from the buoy. How much farther did he have to go? It was hard to judge the distance. He had reached a count of nine, so he should be halfway if he had been putting his hands a foot apart.
His eyes blinked at a form moving up close to him. He saw a man in trunks floating toward him in the water, waving his arms slowly. No, he wasn’t waving—he was swimming! He wore a pair of nose clips but no Momsen Lung. One of the instructors from above, March concluded.
The man motioned his arms upward urgently. Unmistakably March knew that he had been going too slowly, so he increased the tempo of his count slightly. And before he knew it, his eyes blinked in the sunlight and he felt water running down his face. He was up!
“Clips off! Valve off!” an instructor in the water beside him said.
March moved away from the buoy toward the side of the tank, where he saw other men standing on the little platform, and as he did so he removed his nose clips with one hand, shut the oxygen valve. Then he remembered that it had not felt a bit strange to breathe through his mouth instead of through his nose.
“I guess as long as your lungs get the oxygen they need, you don’t much care how it gets there.”
He felt a hand helping him as he climbed up on the little platform at the top of the tower. Standing there, he removed the mouthpiece and then took off the lung itself. As he dried himself and slipped into his robe, the man behind him broke the surface and started toward the edge.
Suddenly March felt a little dizzy. He had looked out the window and had seen how high he was from the ground. And then he smiled.