While they had been talking, the tank had crawled away from the sea, toward the monstrous hulk that lay stranded by the recent storm. Lackland, of course, wanted to examine it in detail, since he had so far seen practically none of Mesklin’s animal life; Barlennan, too, was willing. He had seen many of the monsters that thronged the seas he had traveled all his life, but he was not sure of this one.
Its shape was not too surprising for either of them. It might have been an unusually streamlined whale or a remarkably stout sea snake; the Earthman was reminded of the Zeuglodon that had haunted the seas of his own world thirty million years before. However, nothing that had ever lived on Earth and left fossils for men to study had approached the size of this thing. For six hundred feet it lay along the still tandy soil; in life its body had apparently been cylindrical, tad over eighty feet in diameter. Now, deprived of the support of the liquid in which it had lived, it bore some resemblance to a wax model that had been left too long in the hot sun. Though its flesh was presumably only about half as dense as that of earthly life, its tonnage was still something to stagger Lackland when he tried to estimate it; and the three-times-earth-normal gravity had done its share.
“Just what do you do when you meet something like this at sea?” he asked Barlennan.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” the Mesklinite replied dryly. “I have seen things like this before, but only rarely. They usually stay in the deeper, permanent seas; I have seen one once only on the surface, and about four cast up as is this one. I do not know what they eat, but apparently they find it far below the surface. I have never heard of a ship’s being attacked by one.”
“You probably wouldn’t,” Lackland replied pointedly. “I find it hard to imagine any survivors in such a case. If this thing feeds like some of the whales on my own world, it would inhale one of your ships and probably fail to notice it. Let’s have a look at its mouth and find out.” He started the tank once more, and drove it along to what appeared to be the head end of the vast body.
The thing had a mouth, and a skull of sorts, but the latter was badly crushed by its own weight. There was enough left, however, to permit the correction of Lackland’s guess concerning its eating habits; with those teeth, it could only be carnivorous. At first the man did not recognize them as teeth; only the fact that they were located in a peculiar place for ribs finally led him to the truth.
“You’d be safe enough, Barl,” he said at last. “That thing wouldn’t dream of attacking you. One of your ships would not be worth the effort, as far as its appetite is concerned — I doubt that it would notice anything less than a hundred times the Bree’s size.”
“There must be a lot of meat swimming around in the deeper seas,” replied the Mesklinite thoughtfully. “I don’t see that it’s doing anyone much good, though.”
“True enough. Say, what did you mean a little while ago by that remark about permanent seas? What other kind do you have?”
“I referred to the areas which are still ocean just before the winter storms begin,” was the reply. “The ocean level is at its highest in early spring, at the end of the storms, which have filled the ocean beds during the winter. All the rest of the year they shrink again. Here at the Rim, where shore lines are so steep, it doesn’t make much difference; but up where weight is decent the shore line may move anywhere from two hundred to two thousand miles between spring and fall.” Lackland emitted a low whistle.