_Narwhal_ after bagging the first whale and had given his
position. The submarine would proceed to the kill immediately; then,
after a while, not hearing from him, they would scour the neighborhood,
just as they had hunted for Chan Beddoes when he did not return.

But they'd find him, Ken told himself--and soon. He had no idea how long
he had lain unconscious, but probably by now the mother ship had already
hooked onto the first whale; maybe she was already hunting for him.

"Well, I'd better get out and be ready to signal to 'em with the flash,"
he reflected. "They may miss me here in the mud."

* * * * *

Taking his sea-suit from a long narrow locker, he drew the stiff-woven
fabric over his body, turned the air-units on, clamped the face-shield
shut, and then, gripping his hand-flash, slowly opened the port in the
shell's side.

A weird figure he was, fit for the mysterious gloom into which he came.
With casque of steel and lead-weighted feet, staring face-shield and
metal belt, and equipped with a knife and two or three emergency tools,
the sea-suit transformed him into a clumsy, grotesque giant. He sloshed
into the muddy sea bottom, stumbling at first from the heavy water
resistance and hardly able to see anything. The torpoon itself was a
hazy blur at a short distance, but up above the light was better, being
almost bright next to the ice ceiling. He adjusted the air pressure
inside his suit, floating his feet off the bottom. A few clumsy
armstrokes and he went drifting gently upward.

Knowing that the "bends"--bubbles of air in a diver's veins--come from
too rapidly changing pressures when rising, he made his ascent
carefully. Up twenty feet, then a pause; twenty feet more and another
pause. So he rose some ninety feet, and finally arrived at the underside
of the ice floe.

Here he found the water a pale blue-green, increasing, at the limit of
his vision, to impenetrable black. Nearby was a great dark blur which he
recognized as the killer whale that had struck him down. It bobbed
lifelessly against the smooth, light ceiling of ice. Slowly, he swam
over towards it.

There was no mark of the havoc his last shot must have wreaked inside.
He examined the body with interest, fingering the two inch-long teeth,
which even the mighty sperm whale fears and flees from.

"Pretty wicked," he said aloud, just for the companionship of his voice.
"And there's a lot of oil in this brute. Stre