urret, 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
altitude 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 shell 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 report