There was little he could do to resist them, he realized, for what he
had seen of their movements told him that they were swift, effortless
swimmers. But he braced himself as best he could against the dead whale,
to protect his back. He would at least go down fighting.

As their spectral shapes slid slowly closer he noted something that had
escaped his eyes before. Four or five of them were holding dim objects
in their arm-like flippers. Spears, he made them out to be, rudely
fashioned from bone. And others held dark-colored loops, which they were
slowly forming into nooses.

"They're intelligent, all right," Ken muttered. "Spears--of whalebone, I
guess. And ropes--probably seaweed. Weapons! Good Lord, what kind of
seals are these?"

Easily, gracefully, the silent circle drew in to perhaps twenty feet of
him, where they paused again, hanging motionless at regular intervals in
the eery, wavering half-light. Ken licked his lips nervously. Then the
one whom he had seen first moved its head slightly, in what was
apparently a signal. And in a concerted movement, so bewilderingly rapid
that his eyes could not hold them, they rushed him.

He had expected speed, but not speed such as this. He had barely swung
his knife-arm up when the wave engulfed him.

Doubling, curving shapes looped around him; blubbery bodies pressed
against him; eyes flashed by in streaks of brown; he knew that he was
being tumbled and tossed and that his knife and hand-flash had fallen
under the shock of the attack. And then there was a sharper sensation.
As he struggled to break free, taut cords trussed his legs and arms like
any captive animal's.

The stream of moving bodies slowed in movement and fell back from a
breathless, dazed Kenneth Torrance. He then got his first clear view
since the assault was unleashed.

He was upright, many feet away from the killer whale's carcass, his arms
bound strongly to his sides with seaweed-rope, his legs locked close
together. To one side he glimpsed several of the creatures fastening
other rope strands to the whale's flukes. When they had finished, with
smoothly thrusting flippers they began to haul the carcass forward, and
he felt himself move feet first in the same direction.

He forced a wry smile to his lips. "A swell fight I put up!" he grunted.
"Hold 'em off! Yeah--I bet I held 'em for a full tenth of a second."

* * * * *

He still could hardly believe what had so rap