ephone, this information being
given to the watchers in the submarine later, as all they could gather
then was by what they saw. "What sort of monster is it?"

"A giant starfish!" answered Norton, speaking into his mouthpiece and
the water serving as a transmitting medium instead of wires. "I never
knew they grew so big! This one has its five arms all around Mr.
Newton!"

"A starfish!" murmured Tom. This accounted for it, and, as he looked at
the monster from closer quarters, he saw that Norton had spoken the
truth.

Small starfish, or even large ones, two feet or more in diameter, may
be seen at the seashore almost any time. Nearly always the specimens
cast up on the beach are in extended form, either limp, or dead and
dried. In almost every instance they are spread out just as their name
indicates, in the conventional form of a star.

But a starfish alive, and at its business of eating oysters or other
shell animals in the sea, is not at all this shape. Instead, it
assumes the form of a sack, spreading its five radiating arms around
the object of its meal. It then proceeds to suck the oyster out of its
shell, and so powerful a suction organ has the starfish that he can
pull an oyster through its shell, by forcing the bivalve to open.

And it was a gigantic starfish, a hundred times as large as any Tom had
ever seen, that had Ned in its grip. The creature had doubtless taken
the diver for a new kind of oyster, and was trying to open it. An
octopus has suckers on the inner sides of its eight arms. A starfish
has little feelers, or "fingers," arranged parallel rows on the inner
side of its arms--thousands of little feelers, and these exert a sort
of sucking action.

The gigantic starfish had attacked Ned from above, settling down on him
so that the head of the diver was at the middle of the creature's body,
the five arms, dropping over Ned in a sort of living canopy. And the
arms held tightly.

"Come on, Koku, and you, too, Norton!" called Tom through his headpiece
telephone. "We'll all attack it at once. I'll fire, and then you begin
to hack it. The electric charge ought to stun it, if it doesn't kill
the beast!"

Tom's new electric gun, unlike one kind he had first invented, did not
fire an electrically charged bullet. Instead it sent a powerful charge
of electricity, like a flash of lightning, in a straight line toward
the object aimed at. And the current was powerful enough to kill an
elephant.

Bracing