Four-Day Planet

by H. Beam Piper

  9

  MONSTER KILLING

  There was a man in the turret, waiting to help me. He had a clip offive rounds in the gun, the searchlight on, and the viewscreen tunedto the forward pickup. After checking the gun and loading the chamber,I looked in that, and in the distance, lighted by the boat above andthe searchlight of the _Javelin_, I saw a long neck with a little headon the end of it weaving about. We were making straight for it, losingaltitude 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 headand neck reappeared astern of us. I fired, without too much hope ofhitting anything, and then the ship was rising and circling.

  As soon as I'd fired, the monster had sounded, headfirst. I fired asecond shot at his tail, in hope of crippling his steering gear, butthat was a clean miss, too, and then the ship was up to about fivethousand feet. My helper pulled out the partly empty clip and replacedit 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 wasa couple of hundred miles away from this place; but evidently thatwasn't the way monsters thought, if thinking is what goes on inside abrain cavity the size of a quart bottle in a head the size of two oildrums on a body as big as the ship that was hunting him. He'd found alot of gulpers and funnelmouths, and he wasn't going to be chased awayfrom his dinner by somebody shooting at him.

  I wondered why they didn't eat screwfish, instead of the things thatpreyed on them. Maybe they did and we didn't know it. Or maybe theyjust didn't like screwfish. There were a lot of things we didn't knowabout sea-monsters.

  For that matter, I wondered why we didn't grow tallow-wax bycarniculture. We could grow any other animal matter we wanted. I'doften thought of that.

  The monster wasn't showing any inclination to come to the surfaceagain, and finally Joe Kivelson's voice came out of the intercom:

  "Run in the guns and seal ports. Secure for submersion. We're goingdown and chase him up."

  My helper threw the switch that retracted the gun and sealed the gunport. I checked that and reported, "After gun secure." Hans Cronje'svoice, a moment later, said, "Forward gun secure," and then RamonLlewellyn said, "Ship secure; ready to submerge."

  Then the _Javelin_ began to settle, and the water came up over thewindow. I didn't know what the radar was picking up. All I could seewas the screen and the window; water lighted for about fifty feet infront and behind. I saw a cloud of screwfish pass over and around us,spinning rapidly as they swam as though on lengthwise axis--theyalways spin counterclockwise, never clockwise. A couple offunnelmouths were swimming after them, overtaking and engulfing them.

  Then the captain yelled, "Get set for torpedo," and my helper and Ieach grabbed a stanchion. A couple of seconds later it seemed asthough King Neptune himself had given the ship a poke in the nose; myhands 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 startshooting 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. "Hecould be dead or stunned. Or he could be live and active and spoilingfor 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 withmonsters. A hunter-ship is heavy and it is well-armored--installhyperdrive engines in one, and you could take her from here toTerra--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 ofchair seats around Port Sandor are made of single monster scales. Amonster strikes with its head, like a snake. They can smash a ship'sboat, and they've been known to punch armor-glass windows out of theirframes. I didn't want the window in front of me coming in at me with amonster head the size of a couple of oil drums and full of big tusksfollowing it.

  The _Javelin_ came up fast, but not as fast as the monster, whichseemed to have been injured only in his disposition. He was on thesurface already, about fifty yards astern of us, threshing with hisforty-foot wing-fins, his neck arched back to strike. I started toswing my gun for the chest shot Joe Kivelson had recommended as soonas it was run out, and then the ship was swung around and tilted upforward by a sudden gust of wind. While I was struggling to get thesights back on the monster, the ship gave another lurch and the crosshairs were right on its neck, about six feet below the head. I grabbedthe trigger, and as soon as the shot was off, took my eyes from thesights. I was just a second too late to see the burst, but not toolate to see the monster's neck jerk one way out of the smoke puff andits head fly another. A second later, the window in front of me wassplashed 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 circlingaround since we had submerged, dived into the water and passed underthe monster, coming up on the other side dragging another harpoonline. The monster was still threshing its wings and flogging with itsheadless neck. It takes a monster quite a few minutes to tumble to thefact that it's been killed. My helper was pounding my back black andblue with one hand and trying to pump mine off with the other, and Iwas getting an ovation from all over the ship. At the same time, acouple more harpoons went into the thing from the ship, and the boatput another one in from behind.

  I gathered that shooting monsters' heads off wasn't at all usual, andhastened to pass it off as pure luck, so that everybody would hurry upand deny it before they got the same idea themselves.

  We hadn't much time for ovations, though. We had a very slowly dyingmonster, and before he finally discovered that he was dead, a coupleof harpoons got pulled out and had to be replaced. Finally, however,he quieted down, and the boat swung him around, bringing the tail pastour bow, and the ship cut contragravity to specific-gravity level andsettled to float on top of the water. The boat dived again, and payedout a line that it brought up and around and up again, lashing themonster fast alongside.

  "All right," Kivelson was saying, out of the intercom. "Shooting'sover. 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, andequipment was coming up from below--power saws and sonocutters andeven a solenoid jackhammer. There were half a dozen floodlights, onsmall contragravity lifters; they were run up on lines fifty feetabove the ship's deck. By this time it was completely dark and finesnow was blowing. I could see that Joe Kivelson was anxious to get thecutting-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 arational 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 sowould he. But we do need a good machine gunner. As soon as we startthrowing out waste, we'll have all the slashers and halberd fish formiles 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 passed out the lines of its harpoons, and Murelland I took the places of Cesario Vieira and the other man. We went upto the nose, and Murell took his place at the controls, and I got backof the 7-mm machine gun and made sure that there were plenty of extrabelts of ammo. Then, as we rose, I pulled the goggles down from myhood, swung the gun away from the ship, and hammered off a one-secondburst to make sur
e it was working, after which I settled down, glad Ihad a comfortable seat and wasn't climbing around on that monster.

  They began knocking scales loose with the jackhammer and cutting intothe leathery skin underneath with sonocutters. The sea was gettingheavy, and the ship and the attached monster had begun to roll.

  "That's pretty dangerous work," Murell said. "If a man using one ofthose 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 cutloose big chunks of the yellow tallow-wax and throw them into cargonets and swing them aboard with lifters, to be chucked down the cargohatches. I was only able to watch that for a minute or so and tellMurell what was going on, and then the first halberd fish, with aspearlike nose and sharp ridges of the nearest thing to bone you findon Fenris, came swimming up. I swung the gun on the leader and gavehim 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 theirdead and injured companions and gave them another burst, which wipedout the lot of them.

  It was only a couple of seconds after that that the first slasher camein, shiny as heat-blued steel and waving four clawed tentacles thatgrew around its neck. It took me a second or so to get the sights onhim. He stopped slashing immediately. Slashers are smart; you killthem and they find it out right away.

  Before long, the water around the ship and the monster was pollutedwith things like that. I had to keep them away from the men, nowworking up to their knees in water, and at the same time avoidmassacring the crew I was trying to protect, and Murell had to keepthe boat in position, in spite of a steadily rising wind, and everytime I had to change belts, there'd be a new rush of things that hadto be shot in a hurry. The ammunition bill for covering a cutting-upoperation is one of the things that runs up expenses for ahunter-ship. The ocean bottom around here must be carpeted withmachine-gun brass.

  Finally, they got the job done, and everybody went below and sealedship. We sealed the boat and went down after her. The last I saw, theremains of the monster, now stripped of wax, had been cast off, andthe water around it was rioting with slashers and clawbeaks andhalberd fish and similar marine unpleasantnesses.