"Nils, you're a stubborn cuss. All right. But the minute you get that lion on your harpoon, we're hauling you up."
Nils grinned happily. "That's a deal," he said.
And so Erskine took Nils back down to the raft.
On Uranus there is no sense trying to make a man adapt to any of the natural divisions of time there, such as the rotation of the moons or the position of the sun; and as long as man is attuned to the artificial twenty-four hour day anyway, that is the most convenient unit of time. You have sixteen hours to yourself, for whatever you want to do—sleeping, reading, playing the visitapes, or anything else that strikes your fancy in the limited space of the air bubble, half of which is always dark and the other half always light.
But the other eight hours belong to the company. For six of them you man the pumps or the radio equipment or the cable drum while the other men plunge, and you make your plunges in the other two.
When Nils went on duty that day, he was on the radio, and Kerr was down below. The optimism he had felt after his talk with the captain was dissipated. He realized that, after all, the air lions were a disappearing species. He had been here hunting them for six months and had bagged only six. One a month—yet that was the best record of any of the men. And here he was, expecting to get his seventh in the next day or so.
Kerr was calling for more cable. Nils reassured him absently and signaled the crew at the drum.
The hunter said, "What's the matter, Nils? You don't sound happy."
Nils said into the microphone, "Don't worry about me. You watch out for those lions."