Barney and the Murderer had been one of the diving teams out there when a submarine ejected the buoys beneath the polar ice. A buoy would squirt from a torpedo tube. When the non-magnetic float struck the underside of the ice, metal rods clutched upward like the legs of a spider clinging to the ice. A thread-like cable lowered the tiny instrument capsule into the depths. The capsule's small size was intended to foil typical mine detection sonar, while the float was supposed to merge with irregularities of sonic reflection on the underside of the ice. Some admiral had even ordered the floats painted white, but they still cut off light and appeared dark from beneath the ice. * * * * * After the divers had melted a quick hole through two or three feet of pack ice and extended the whip-like aerial into the polar air, headquarters could keep track of the drifting buoy's location. Intermittently, for the classified number of years the batteries were supposed to last, each buoy would broadcast its own identification code, only coming through with a high wattage warning when its instrument capsule in the depths of the Arctic Ocean was awakened. The joker here, the Murderer thought, was that the aerials might be hard to see, but any simple fool could make himself a radio location finder. _Live_ buoys could be hunted from the surface ice. "How dry I am," Barney's voice croaked unmusically, "how dry I be, nobody knows--nobody cares--" Now the white underside of the ice drooped in downward bulges, indicating thicker masses of old ice that had been frozen into the pack. The Murderer saw the gray outline of driftwood entombed in this old ice. "Drift ice from the Siberian rivers," Barney croaked. "When we planted the picket buoys, our sector didn't have any of this." The Murderer looked down at his instruments, preparing to change course. "My God, look!" Barney's voice croaked, and his black rubber arm pointed upward. The Murderer's breathing stopped as he made out something quivering up there. "What is it?" "Animal, vegetable or mineral," Barney wheezed. "If it's animal, I don't want to be around when whatever laid these _eggs_ comes back." Swaying up there on the underside of the ice in a gelatinous mass at least twenty feet across, it resembled a mass of gigantic frog's eggs. But the Murderer decided there was too great a variation in size for them to be eggs. Those nearest the outside of the mass seemed clearer, more transparent, than the surrounding gelatinous substance. The Murderer's excitement began to fade. "They're not eggs," he said disappointedly. "I think they're only bubbles encased in some sort of soft plastic."