Slime strung down from the tentacles of the Trumask as they writhed toward her in undulating evil shudders. The trunk gaped open.
All of the girl's reactions went through his brain, and he was amazed by their pointless complexity. A thousand fragments jostled each other in her mind. Memories of the past, forgotten mistakes, hopes for the future with no regard for probability, visions of the lover who waited in the SHIP. All these and many more, equally irrelevant to this dire situation. She should be concentrating on one thing—escape. Yet she was not moving. She was in a kind of paralysis he could not understand.
Now, now, she was acting, but, as usual, far too late. She was trying to employ the weapon. But one of the bloated red tentacles flipped it from her hand. She sagged down, her mouth mumbling incoherent symbols. She dropped on her knees in the oozing scum, digging down frantically in a sobbing attempt to find the weapon; but three of the viscuous tentacles encircled her. They dragged her toward the maw of the trunk that now gaped to its full, cavernous capacity. Her terrified eyes could see an unrecognizable amorphous shape still struggling weakly down in that pulsating well.
He acted as lightning strikes, instinctively. Later he would know why. In his world thought had to follow action. His huge jaws closed on a number of the thick tentacles, severed them. They whipped free of the girl, jerking and contorting, slashing the murky vapor in aimless death patterns. The girl somehow had staggered out of reach of the remaining ones.
He dropped down again, out of sight, writhing away to bury himself again in mud and fog. He searched her mind. Had she seen him? She must have. Strange that he could find no reaction. There seemed to be a kind of shock. She had seen him. Then some mental defense mechanism had blinded her memory to him. Did she find him ugly? Why? Should not he be possessed of some kind of beauty, also? He had within him the capacity to appreciate beauty. At least she should be sympathetic and grateful and kind to him if she knew he was saving her from death, and pain. Yet—her mind would not accept him. She had seen him briefly, then forgotten.
Her terror and nervous disintegration was acute now. He could save her from physical dangers, but he could not protect this soft strange mind and nervous system from breaking apart and losing its balance of function.
Yet her beauty still remained, and that was his chief interest. The fluid motion, contour, symmetry and rhythm remained as before; was the justification for her continued existence in his eyes.
Her motions did not follow her mental direction at all now. She reached her hands out as though trying to part thick mist like a solid web. She groped about in small circles. Then she stopped, her eyes parted wide, and she screamed. Through the holocaust of sound—the cries, bellows, and screeches and hisses of the swamp—her scream was almost soundless. Yet its mental significance cut into his great brain like a wound.
Torrg!
The scream's effect had detracted even his wondrous instinctive mechanism for an instant. During that second the Torrg heaved itself up almost beneath her. Something slithered through his brain, rippling down his long curved length—the closest emotion to fear his nervous system could approach. He hesitated, flinching away.