Four-Day Planet

rd 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 th

ht for the advancing light. The forward gun went off, shaking the ship with its r

ace into the sight-mask. An instant later, the head and neck reappeared astern of us. I fi

ng his steering gear, but that was a clean miss, too, and then the ship was up to about five thousand feet. My

onsters 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

on them. Maybe they did and we didn't know it. Or maybe they just didn't l

low-wax by carniculture. We could grow any other a

to come to the surface again, and finally J

s. Secure for submersion. We'r

that and reported, "After gun secure." Hans Cronje's voice, a moment later, said, "

e 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 thou

nds later it seemed as though King Neptune himself had given the ship a poke in the nose; my hands were almost

run the guns out and start shootin

ned?" I ask

him," he said. "He could be dead or stunned. Or he

rom 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 s

commended 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 so

ther 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 hastened to pass it off as pure luck, so that everybody wo

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

out of the intercom. "Shooting's

aws 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'

use a machine g

of it; a machine gun is fired i

re, 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

not to add: "And don't

e 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

nto the leathery skin underneath with sonocutters. The sea was get

Murell said. "If a man using o

met our peg-legged compositor, Jul

or wanting all they c

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 an

waving four clawed tentacles that grew around its neck. It took me a second or so to get the sights on

ing 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

after her. The last I saw, the remains of the monster, now stripped of wax, had been cast off, and the wa