e second Hawk Carse was snatched from sleep into the turmoil of a
fight for life.

Something hard and enormously powerful was wrapping his waist with a
vise-like grip that threatened to cut him in two. He felt a leg go up
and crumple back, almost breaking under the force of a lashing blow.
He was squeezed in, caged, compressed, by a score of tough, encircling
tentacles, and his whole body was drawn toward a wide, flexible,
black-lipped mouth yawning in the center of the monster he had thought
a stump. Moving with loathsome life, its sinewy root-tentacles sucking
him whole into the maw, the thing hunched itself back to the water.

The water frothed around Carse. He had been too dazed to resist; he
had not known what had gripped him in his unconsciousness and
weakness. But he remembered his ray-gun.

The lips of the hideous mouth were pressing close. Both were now under
the surface. Carse's suit was still tight and he could breathe even
while totally submerged in the water. He strained his left arm against
the tentacle that looped it, worked the ray-gun still clasped in his
hand in line with the thing's monstrous carcass, and at once, gasping
and sick, pulled the trigger clear back.

The orange stream sizzled as it cleared a path through the water and
bit true into the gaping mouth. There sounded a curious, subterranean
sob; beady eyes on each side of the mouth bulged; the woodish body
quivered in agony. Its tentacles slackened, and, half fainting, the
Hawk wrenched free. He staggered up onto the land, streams of water
running off the suit, and toppled over; and from there he saw the
thing drag its writhing shuddering shape farther out from the shore.
When perhaps sixty feet away it again subsided into a "harmless"
uprooted old stump....

* * * * *

Carse lay resting and collecting himself for a quarter of an hour,
while Leithgow and Friday slept on, unconscious of what had happened;
then he got to his feet, opened their face-plates and bathed
Leithgow's pale brow with water. The scientist awoke with the
quickness of old men, but Friday stirred and stretched and blinked and
sat up at last, yawning.

The Hawk answered their questions about his wet suit with a brief
explanation of the fight, then got down to business.

"There's water here, but we must have food," he said. "Friday, you go
back and find fruit; some isuan weed, too, if it's growing nearby. A
chew of it will stimulate us