ed
out the lot of them.

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

Before long, the water around the ship and the monster was polluted
with things like that. I had to keep them away from the men, now
working up to their knees in water, and at the same time avoid
massacring the crew I was trying to protect, and Murell had to keep
the boat in position, in spite of a steadily rising wind, and every
time I had to change belts, there'd be a new rush of things that had
to be shot in a hurry. The ammunition bill for covering a cutting-up
operation is one of the things that runs up expenses for a
hunter-ship. The ocean bottom around here must be carpeted with
machine-gun brass.

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

10

MAYDAY, MAYDAY

Getting a ship's boat berthed inside the ship in the air is tricky
work under the best of conditions; the way the wind was blowing by
now, it would have been like trying to thread a needle inside a
concrete mixer. We submerged after the ship and went in underwater.
Then we had to wait in the boat until the ship rose above the surface
and emptied the water out of the boat berth. When that was done and
the boat berth was sealed again, the ship went down seventy fathoms
and came to rest on the bottom, and we unsealed the boat and got out.

There was still the job of packing the wax into skins, but that could
wait. Everybody was tired and dirty and hungry. We took turns washing
up, three at a time, in the little ship's latrine which, for some
reason going back to sailing-ship days on Terra, was called the
"head." Finally the whole sixteen of us gathered in the relatively
comfortable wardroom under the after gun turret.

Comfortable, that is, to the extent that everybody could find a place
to sit down, or could move about without tripping over somebody else.
There was a big pot of coffee, and everybody had a plate or bowl of
hot food. Th