Gee! I thought. I"m one of the crew, now.
"Yes sir!" I grabbed the handrail of the ladder and slid down, then raced aft to the gun turret.
9
MONSTER KILLING
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 alt.i.tude 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 sh.e.l.l 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 Ramon 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 pa.s.s 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-gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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."
He was courteous enough not to add: "And don"t shoot any of the crew."
The boat came in and pa.s.sed out the lines of its harpoons, and Murell and I took the places of Cesario Vieira and the other man. We went up to the nose, and Murell took his place at the controls, and I got back of the 7-mm machine gun and made sure that there were plenty of extra belts of ammo. Then, as we rose, I pulled the goggles down from my hood, swung the gun away from the ship, and hammered off a one-second burst to make sure it was working, after which I settled down, glad I had a comfortable seat and wasn"t climbing around on that monster.
They began knocking scales loose with the jackhammer and cutting into the leathery skin underneath with sonocutters. The sea was getting heavy, and the ship and the attached monster had begun to roll.
"That"s pretty dangerous work," Murell said. "If a man using one of those cutters slipped...."
"It"s happened," I told him. "You met our peg-legged compositor, Julio. That was how he lost his leg."
"I don"t blame them for wanting all they can get for tallow-wax."
They had the monster opened down the belly, and were beginning to cut loose big chunks of the yellow tallow-wax and throw them into cargo nets and swing them aboard with lifters, to be chucked down the cargo hatches. I was only able to watch that for a minute or so and tell Murell what was going on, and then the first halberd fish, with a spearlike nose and sharp ridges of the nearest thing to bone you find on Fenris, came swimming up. I swung the gun on the leader and gave him a second of fire, and then a two-second burst on the ones behind.
Then I waited for a few seconds until the survivors converged on their dead and injured companions and gave them another burst, which wiped out the lot of them.
It was only a couple of seconds after that that the first slasher came in, shiny as heat-blued steel and waving four clawed tentacles that grew around its neck. It took me a second or so to get the sights on him. He stopped slashing immediately. Slashers are smart; you kill them and they find it out right away.
Before long, the water around the ship and the monster was polluted with things like that. I had to keep them away from the men, now working up to their knees in water, and at the same time avoid ma.s.sacring the crew I was trying to protect, and Murell had to keep the boat in position, in spite of a steadily rising wind, and every time I had to change belts, there"d be a new rush of things that had to be shot in a hurry. The ammunition bill for covering a cutting-up operation is one of the things that runs up expenses for a hunter-ship. The ocean bottom around here must be carpeted with machine-gun bra.s.s.
Finally, they got the job done, and everybody went below and sealed ship. We sealed the boat and went down after her. The last I saw, the remains of the monster, now stripped of wax, had been cast off, and the water around it was rioting with slashers and clawbeaks and halberd fish and similar marine unpleasantnesses.
10
MAYDAY, MAYDAY
Getting a ship"s boat berthed inside the ship in the air is tricky work under the best of conditions; the way the wind was blowing by now, it would have been like trying to thread a needle inside a concrete mixer. We submerged after the ship and went in underwater.
Then we had to wait in the boat until the ship rose above the surface and emptied the water out of the boat berth. When that was done and the boat berth was sealed again, the ship went down seventy fathoms and came to rest on the bottom, and we unsealed the boat and got out.
There was still the job of packing the wax into skins, but that could wait. Everybody was tired and dirty and hungry. We took turns washing up, three at a time, in the little ship"s latrine which, for some reason going back to sailing-ship days on Terra, was called the "head." Finally the whole sixteen of us gathered in the relatively comfortable wardroom under the after gun turret.