"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." A little fish, perhaps lost from its school, peered into the Murderer's glass face-plate. Its wondrous eye grew inquisitively larger, and he thought of the millions of cooperating cells that made up its eye and optic nerve and receiving brain and the marvel that the individually drifting cells of two billion years ago could have achieved this. There was a contradiction, he thought. He was amazed by life and yet he speared fish. Did he enjoy feeling life wriggle on the end of his spear? "I've reached the top," Barney's voice croaked. "There's a rod here--get this, a vertical rod. It extends up into the ice like with the aerials of our picket buoys. I knew it wasn't a mine. This is how they plan to detect our atomic submarines. This will make a very interesting present for Admiral Rickover--" At this instant there was a darkening slap against the Murderer's mask. His eardrums burst inward. His intestines squeezed up into his chest from the force of the underwater explosion. He blacked out. * * * * * Ice water seared his face. He was drowning. Convulsively, his hand groped for his mask. The glass was intact. His hand dragged the mask back to a proper fit upon his face, and compressed air forced out the sea water. He could feel the telephone cord pulling at his mask. Everything was blinding white, and he realized he was belly up beneath the ice. "Barney?" The telephone wire began to drag him down head first, and he went down it hand over hand toward the slowly sinking minisub. "Barney?"