"I am Moljar."
She sighed resignedly. "You say that like omnipotence would say, 'I'm
God'."
"It is enough for me. Who can say they know of more than themselves? I
simply know I am Moljar. I live. I have purpose. The pelt of Alhone. A
pledge I must keep. Beyond that--nothing."
She tossed wet hair from her eyes. "Maybe your barbaric code is best
after all. The System's returned to barbarism. Decay, ruin. Why not
a philosophy to fit it? I rather like you. If you only weren't a
half-breed."
He grinned. "If you only were not a mutant." His eyes caught a dark,
flat floating object some distance away. A blurred, indistinct outline.
He pointed.
"Looks like something large enough to float us," she said. Then she
cried out suddenly and pointed over his shoulder.
His knife was in his hands as his legs churned him around in the
brackish water. The sea-serpent's flat head arched high above them,
dripping an avalanche of weed and water upon their upturned faces. Its
sleek, sinuous body shot upward, a monster with fanged jaws and darting
forked tongue, with bulging eyes, and bony head and snout.
"Keep diving," yelled Moljar. "It won't open its mouth under water." He
watched her surface dive like a fish, then followed himself just as the
bullet-like head of the hissing hydrophidian slashed down.
Its massive length coiled and uncoiled savagely about them. The water
was a churning white foam. Moljar tried repeatedly to sink his knife
into the under-belly of the serpent. But it was like soft but tough
plastic, only slightly resilient.
[Illustration: _Its massive length coiled and uncoiled savagely about
them._]
He broke surface, gasped great gulps of the dense air. He saw Mahra
and pointed to the right toward the flat raft object they had seen
floating there. He yelled. "Keep diving and swimming toward that." Then
he went under again as the serpent's head slapped into the water where
his own head had been.
It was a world of phosphorescent glimmerings like monstrous fireflies,
bubbling and coruscating about his staring eyes as he battled the
boiling currents stirred by the serpent. He swam until his lungs were
shrieking with agony, then came up again for air. He was only a few
feet this time from the floating area. It looked like a collected mass
of debris now.
He swam frantically toward it. If he could get up out of the water, he
could break out his electro-gun. He looked around for the girl. Her
head bobbed up. But still some distance from him. The hydrophidian
hissed angrily and struck again. Her silver hair disappeared beneath
the serpent's mouth.
He drew himself up onto the raft. He had a quick second of appraisal as
he tore the gun from its plastic wrappings. The raft was solid, very
buoyant, and membranaceous. Its surface was glossy and veined like the
broad leaves of the swamp lilies.
How thick this raft was, how it was made, or how much more of it there
was Moljar had no time to think about. But he did know it was alive!
The girl came up a few metres from him this time. Her arms moved
weakly. Her face was deathly pale and her eyes pleaded silently beneath
the bizarre strands of her silver hair. She again started to sink
wearily down as the serpent hissed hungrily and struck.
This time it would have feasted. However Moljar's electro-gun crackled,
and its lethal charges burned the monster's glistening length into
pieces. They fell writhing in separate anguish all around the girl,
crimsoning the water to a thick red.
He lifted her easily up onto the raft-creature. She sank down in a
dripping and exhausted heap.
"For a half-breed," she whispered between gasps, "you have courage."
Then she closed her eyes. The raft rippled and bucked slightly as
something huge stirred against its bottom.
* * * * *
The night hours before morning were illuminated, a strange twilight of
phosphorescence. They sat in the middle of the organic raft and waited
tensely. The stirring beneath it had grown more violent.
"Man isn't the only highly adaptable animal--not even the most
ingenious." The girl's tone was pedantic, amazingly learned. Moljar
nodded surlily, not so interested, apparently, in lectures. He edged
toward the girl until their shoulders touched. She paused. Continued.
"The animal that build this raft for itself is hiding beneath it now.
The serpent frightened it. Soon it will have to come up for air."
"How do you know so much," he growled.
"Earth University of Interplanetary Fauna," she said.