Startide Rising by David Brin Page B

Thomas Orley. His official title was Alien Technologies Consultant, but it was clear he was also out here as a psychologist, to help Dr. Metz and Dr. Baskin evaluate the performance of an integrated dolphin crew. He knew cetaceans, and might be able to tell her what Sah’ot wanted from her.
    Tom would know what to do, but …
    Her habitual indecision reasserted itself. There were plenty of reasons not to bother Tom right now, like the fact that he was spending every waking moment trying to find a way to save all of their lives. Of course, the same could be said of most of the crew, but experience and reputation suggested that Orley just might be able to come up with a way to get Streaker and her crew away from Kithrup before the ETs captured her.
    Dennie sighed. Another reason to put it off was pure embarrassment. It wasn’t easy for a young fem to ask personal advice of a mel as worldly as Thomas Orley. Particularly when the subject was how to cope with the advances of an amorous porpoise.
    However kind Tom would be, he would also be forced to laugh—or obviously bite back laughter. The situation, Dennie admitted, would have to seem funny, to anyone but the object of the seduction.
    Dennie quickened her pace up the gently curved corridor toward the lift. Why did I ever want to go into space, anyway? she asked herself. Sure, it was an opportunity to advance my career. And my personal life was in a shambles anyway, on Earth. But now where am I? My analysis of Kithrupan biology is getting nowhere. There are thousands of bug-eyed monsters circling over the planet slathering to come down and get me, and a horny dolphin’s harassing me with suggestions that would make Catherine the Great blush.
    It wasn’t fair, of course, but when had life ever been fair?
     
    Streaker had been built from a modified Snark hunterclass exploration vessel. Few Snarks were still in service. As Terrans became more comfortable with the refined technologies of the Library, they learned to combine the old and new—ancient Galactic designs and indigenous Terran technologies. This process had been in a particularly awkward phase when the Snarks were built.
    The ship was a bulb-ended cylinder with jutting, crane-like reality flanges in five bands of five along her hull. In space the flanges anchored her to a protecting sphere of stasis. Now they served as landing legs as the wounded Streaker lay on her side in a muddy canyon, eighty meters below the surface of an alien sea.
    Between the third and fourth rings of flanges, the hull bulged outward slightly for the dry-wheel. In free space the wheel rotated, providing a primitive form of artificial gravity. Humans and their clients had learned how to generate gravity fields, but almost every Earth ship still possessed a centrifugal wheel. Some saw it as a trademark, advertising what some friendly species had recommended Terrans keep quiet, that the three races of Sol were different from any others in space … the “orphans” of Earth.
    Streaker’s wheel held room for up to forty humans, though right now there were only seven and one chimpanzee. It also held recreation facilities for the dolphin crew, pools for leaping and splashing and sexual play during off-duty hours.
    But on a planet’s surface the wheel could not turn. Most of its rooms were tilted and inaccessible. And the great central bay of the ship was filled with water.
    Dennie rode a lift up one of the spokes connecting the dry-wheel to the ship’s rigid spine. The spine supported Streaker’s open interior. Dennie stepped from the elevator into a hexagonal hallway with doors and access panels at all angles, until she reached the main bay lock, fifty meters forward of the wheel spokes.
    In weightlessness she would have glided rather than walked down the long passage. Gravity made the corridor eerily unfamiliar.
    In the bay-lock, a wall of transparent cabinets held spacesuits and diving gear. Dennie chose a bikini from her locker, and a