The Terror from the Depths Part 4

It seemed to me he was grinning. His mouth was partially open, and the pale, writhing barbels that surrounded his mouth seemed to reach out toward me. The long and graceful antennae were bent downward inquiringly, quivering tensely, and his small eyes glowed like wind-fanned coals of fire. The brownish fins were rigid as metal, the retractile claws unsheathed and cruelly curved. He was so close that I could hear the air rushing through his crater-like breathing holes.

For an instant we stared at each other; he with confident gloating: myself, too startled and horrified to move. Then, as his head shot downward, I leaped aside.

The scaly head raked the clothes from one side of my body, and sent me, sprawling and breathless, into the welter of sagging weeds.

I heard the sharp whine of my ray generator going into action, but I took no chances on the accuracy of my men. They were working under tremendous difficulties. As I fell, I s.n.a.t.c.hed an atomic bomb from my belt, and, as the horrid head drew back to strike again, I threw the bomb with all my strength.

I had thrown from an exceedingly awkward position, and the bomb exploded harmlessly some distance away, showering us with muck and slimy vegetation.

Evidently, however, the explosion startled the serpent, for his head slewed around nervously, and I felt the ground tremble under me as his mighty coils lashed the ground in anger. Scrambling to my feet, I seized the projector tube of the disintegrator ray and swept the beam upward until it beat upon that terrible head.

The thing screamed--a high, thin sound almost past the range of audibility. Reddish dust sifted down around me--the heavy dust of disintegration. In the distance, I could hear the slashing of the tail as it tore through the rubbery growth of weeds.

With half his head eroded by the ray, the serpent struck again, but this time his aim was wild. The mighty head half buried itself in the muck beside me, and I swung the projector tube down so that the full force of the ray tore into the region above and behind the eyes, where I imagined the brain to be. The heavy reddish dust fairly pelted from the ugly head.

Correy had come running back. Dimly, I could hear him shouting.

"Look out!" I warned him. "Keep back, Correy! Keep the men back! I've got him, but he'll die hard--"

As though to prove my words true, the head, a ghastly thing eroded into a shapeless ma.s.s, was jerked from the mud, and two tremendous loops of tortured body came hurtling over my head. One of the huge fins swung by like a sail, its hooked talons ripping one of Correy's men into b.l.o.o.d.y shreds. Correy himself, caught in a desperate endeavor to save the unfortunate man, was knocked twenty feet. For one terrible instant, I thought the beast had killed Correy also.

Gasping, Correy rose to his feet, and I ran to a.s.sist him.

"Back, men!" I shouted. "Hendricks! Get away as far and as fast as you can. Back! _Back!_" Half dragging Correy, who was still breathless from the blow, I hurried after the men.

Behind us, shaking the earth in his death agonies, the monstrous serpent beat the plain about him into a veritable sea of slime.

From a point of vantage, atop the _Ertak_, we watched for the end.

"I have never," said Correy in an awed voice, "seen anything take so long to die."

"You have never before," I commented grimly, "seen a snake so large. It took ages to grow that mighty body; it is but natural that, even with the brain disintegrated into dust, the body would not die immediately."

"Undoubtedly he has a highly decentralized nervous system," nodded Hendricks, who was, as I have said, something of a practical scientific man, although no laboratory worker or sniveling scientist. "And instinct is directing him back toward the sea from which, all unwillingly, he came. Look--he's almost in the water."

"I don't care where he goes," said Correy savagely, "so he goes there as carrion. Clark was a good man, sir." Clark was the man the serpent had killed.

"True," I said. Making the entry of that loss would hurt; even though the discipline of the Service is--or at least, used to be--very rigid, officers get rather close to their men during the course of many tours of duty in the confines of a little ship like the _Ertak_. "But the _Kabit_, with her nearly two thousand souls, is safe."

We all looked up. The _Kabit_ was no longer visible. Battered, but still s.p.a.ce-worthy, she had gone on her way.

"I suppose," grinned Correy, "that we'll be thanked by radio." The grin was real; Correy had had action enough to make him happy for a time. The nervous tension was gone.

"Probably. But--watch our friend! He's in the water at last. I imagine that's the last we'll see of him."

Half of the tremendous body was already in the water, lashing it into white foam. The rest of the great length slid, twitching, down the sh.o.r.e. The water boiled and seethed; dark loops flipped above the surface and disappeared. And then, as though the giant serpent had found peace at last, the waters subsided, and only the wreaths of white foam upon the surface showed where he had sunk to the ooze that had given him birth.

"Finish," I commented. "All that's left is for the scientists to flock here to admire his bones. They'll probably condemn us for ruining his skull. It took them a good many thousand years to find the remains of a sea-serpent on Earth, you remember."

"Some time in the Twenty-second Century, wasn't it, sir?" asked Hendricks. "I think my memory serves me well."

"I wouldn't swear to it. I know that sailors reported them for ages, but that wouldn't do for the laboratory men and the scientists. They had to have the bones right before them, subject to tests and measurements."

That's the trouble with the scientists, I've found. Their ability to believe is atrophied. They can't see beyond their laboratory tables.

Of course, I'm just an old man, and perhaps I'm bitter with the drying sap of age. That's what I've been told. "Old John Hanson" they call me, and smile as if to say that explains everything.

Old? Of course I'm old! But the years behind me are not empty years. I didn't spend them bending over little instruments, or compiling rows of figures.

And I was right about the scientists--they did put in a protest concerning our thoughtlessness in ruining the head of the serpent. They could only estimate the capacity of the brain-pan, argue about the cephalic index, and guess at the frontal angle: it was a terrible blow to science.

Bitter old John Hanson!