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Gaave him a hard stare, then shook her head and crawled farther out onto the bow She bunched her legs under her and was preparing to make the leap

"Stop!" Trout shouted

She turned and glared at him "Make up your mind"

Trout had seen what Galassy sides above thee that had been kicked up by the churning seemed to have reached an invisible barrier beyond which it failed to rise The debris wasback down into the funnel as quickly as it had risen

"Look," he yelled "That sea trash is being pulled down again"

It took Gaht The ao Trout stretched his hand out and pulled her back into the boat They held on to the safety lines, unable to do anything more than watch helplessly as their boat descended farther into the abyss

9

The spherical figure on the computer screen reminded Austin of the nant cell

He turned to Adler "What exactly are we dealing with here, Professor?"

The scientist scratched his shaggy head "Hell, Kurt, you gotin a circle at thirty knots I've never seen anything like it, in size or speed"

"Neither have I," Austin said "I've run into rough swirling currents that gave me sweaty palms They were comparatively s out of Edgar Allan Poe or Jules Verne"

"The vortex in Descent into the Maelstroely literary inventions Poe and Verne were inspired by the Moskstraumen maelstrom off Norway's Lofoten Islands The Greek historian Pytheas described itships and throwing thenus wrote in the 1500s that it was stronger than Charybdis froainst the botto whales"

"That's the stuff of fiction What about reality?"

"Far less frightening The Norwegian whirlpool has been scientifically measured, and it isn't even close to the violent cauldron described in literature Three other significant whirlpools, Corryvreckan, Scotland, Saltstraumen, also off Norway, and Naruto, near Japan, are far less powerful" He shook his head "Odd to see any whirlpool action on the open sea"

"Why is that?"