There was a man in the turret, waiting to help me. He had a clip of
five rounds in the gun, the searchlight on, and the viewscreen tuned
to the forward pickup. After checking the gun and loading the chamber,
I looked in that, and in the distance, lighted by the boat above and
the searchlight of the _Javelin_, I saw a long neck with a little head
on the end of it weaving about. We were making straight for it, losing
altitude and speed as we went.
Then the neck dipped under the water and a little later reappeared,
coming straight for the advancing light. The forward gun went off,
shaking the ship with its recoil, and the head ducked under again.
There was a spout from the shell behind it.
I took my eyes from the forward screen and looked out the rear window,
ready to shove my face into the sight-mask. An instant later, the head
and neck reappeared astern of us. I fired, without too much hope of
hitting anything, and then the ship was rising and circling.
As soon as I'd fired, the monster had sounded, headfirst. I fired a
second shot at his tail, in hope of crippling his steering gear, but
that was a clean miss, too, and then the ship was up to about five
thousand feet. My helper pulled out the partly empty clip and replaced
it with a full one, giving me five and one in the chamber.
If I'd been that monster, I thought, I'd have kept on going till I was
a couple of hundred miles away from this place; but evidently that
wasn't the way monsters thought, if thinking is what goes on inside a
brain cavity the size of a quart bottle in a head the size of two oil
drums on a body as big as the ship that was hunting him. He'd found a
lot of gulpers and funnelmouths, and he wasn't going to be chased away
from his dinner by somebody shooting at him.
I wondered why they didn't eat screwfish, instead of the things that
preyed on them. Maybe they did and we didn't know it. Or maybe they
just didn't like screwfish. There were a lot of things we didn't know
about sea-monsters.
For that matter, I wondered why we didn't grow tallow-wax by
carniculture. We could grow any other animal matter we wanted. I'd
often thought of that.
The monster wasn't showing any inclination to come to the surface
again, and finally Joe Kivelson's voice came out of the intercom:
"Run in the guns and seal ports. Secure for submersion. We're going
down and chase him up."
My helper threw the switch that retracted the gun and sealed the gun
port. I checked that and reported, "After gun secure." Hans Cronje's
voice, a moment later, said, "Forward gun secure," and then Ramón
Llewellyn said, "Ship secure; ready to submerge."
Then the _Javelin_ began to settle, and the water came up over the
window. I didn't know what the radar was picking up. All I could see
was the screen and the window; water lighted for about fifty feet in
front and behind. I saw a cloud of screwfish pass over and around us,
spinning rapidly as they swam as though on lengthwise axis--they
always spin counterclockwise, never clockwise. A couple of
funnelmouths were swimming after them, overtaking and engulfing them.
Then the captain yelled, "Get set for torpedo," and my helper and I
each grabbed a stanchion. A couple of seconds later it seemed as
though King Neptune himself had given the ship a poke in the nose; my
hands were almost jerked loose from their hold. Then she swung slowly,
nosing up and down, and finally Joe Kivelson spoke again:
"We're going to surface. Get set to run the guns out and start
shooting as soon as we're out of the water."
"What happened?" I asked my helper.
"Must have put the torp right under him and lifted him," he said. "He
could be dead or stunned. Or he could be live and active and spoiling
for a fight."
That last could be trouble. The _Times_ had run quite a few stories,
some with black borders, about ships that had gotten into trouble with
monsters. A hunter-ship is heavy and it is well-armored--install
hyperdrive engines in one, and you could take her from here to
Terra--but a monster is a tough brute, and he has armor of his own,
scales an inch or so thick and tougher than sole leather. A lot of
chair seats around Port Sandor are made of single monster scales. A
monster strikes with its head, like a snake. They can smash a ship's
boat, and they've been known to punch armor-glass windows out of their
frames. I didn't want the window in front of me coming in at me with a
monster head the size of a couple of oil drums and full of big tusks
following it.
The _Javelin_ came up fast, but not as fast as the monster, which
seemed to have been injured only in his disposition. He was on the
surface already, about fifty yards astern of us, threshing with his
forty-foot wing-fins, his neck arched back to strike. I started to
swing my gun for the chest shot Joe Kivelson had recommended as soon
as it was run out, and then the ship was swung around and tilted up
forward by a sudden gust of wind. While I was struggling to get the
sights back on the monster, the ship gave another lurch and the cross
hairs were right on its neck, about six feet below the head. I grabbed
the trigger, and as soon as the shot was off, took my eyes from the
sights. I was just a second too late to see the burst, but not too
late to see the monster's neck jerk one way out of the smoke puff and
its head fly another. A second later, the window in front of me was
splashed with blood as the headless neck came down on our fantail.
Immediately, two rockets jumped from the launcher over the gun turret,
planting a couple of harpoons, and the boat, which had been circling
around since we had submerged, dived into the water and passed under
the monster, coming up on the other side dragging another harpoon
line. The monster was still threshing its wings and flogging with its
headless neck. It takes a monster quite a few minutes to tumble to the
fact that it's been killed. My helper was pounding my back black and
blue with one hand and trying to pump mine off with the other, and I
was getting an ovation from all over the ship. At the same time, a
couple more harpoons went into the thing from the ship, and the boat
put another one in from behind.
I gathered that shooting monsters' heads off wasn't at all usual, and
hastened to pass it off as pure luck, so that everybody would hurry up
and deny it before they got the same idea themselves.
We hadn't much time for ovations, though. We had a very slowly dying
monster, and before he finally discovered that he was dead, a couple
of harpoons got pulled out and had to be replaced. Finally, however,
he quieted down, and the boat swung him around, bringing the tail past
our bow, and the ship cut contragravity to specific-gravity level and
settled to float on top of the water. The boat dived again, and payed
out a line that it brought up and around and up again, lashing the
monster fast alongside.
"All right," Kivelson was saying, out of the intercom. "Shooting's
over. All hands for cutting-up."
I pulled on a parka and zipped it up and went out onto the deck.
Everybody who wasn't needed at engines or controls was there, and
equipment was coming up from below--power saws and sonocutters and
even a solenoid jackhammer. There were half a dozen floodlights, on
small contragravity lifters; they were run up on lines fifty feet
above the ship's deck. By this time it was completely dark and fine
snow was blowing. I could see that Joe Kivelson was anxious to get the
cutting-up finished before the wind got any worse.
"Walt, can you use a machine gun?" he asked me.
I told him I could. I was sure of it; a machine gun is fired in a
rational and decent manner.
"Well, all right. Suppose you cover for us from the boat," he said.
"Mr. Murell can pilot for you. You never worked at cutting-up before,
and neither did he. You'd be more of a hindrance than a help and so
would he. But we do need a good machine gunner. As soon as we start
throwing out waste, we'll have all the slashers and halberd fish for
miles around. You just shoot them as fast as you see them."