He was upright, many feet away from the killer whale's carcass, his arms bound strongly to his sides with seaweed-rope, his legs locked close together. To one side he glimpsed several of the creatures fastening other rope strands to the whale's flukes. When they had finished, with smoothly thrusting flippers they began to haul the carcass forward, and he felt himself move feet first in the same direction.
He forced a wry smile to his lips. "A swell fight I put up!" he grunted. "Hold 'em off! Yeah—I bet I held 'em for a full tenth of a second."
He still could hardly believe what had so rapidly befallen him. It was difficult to credit eyes that showed him creatures whose bodies were mainly seal-like, and yet whose weapons and co-ördinated movements spoke for human intelligence. But they were certainly real. At his feet he could feel the pressure of a guard's flippers against him.
He was towed in this fashion for some distance when the pressure of the flippers suddenly tightened and he was pulled into a deep-angled swoop toward the sea-bottom below. Previously he had seen his captors' amazing speed, but now he felt it. Down and down he went, and at last, when it seemed he must crash into the sea floor, his momentum was quickly checked, and he found himself standing in the mud, from which position, lacking support from his guard, he drifted to a horizontal one, face up. And there, lying helpless on the bottom, he saw the reason for the sudden dive. Far to the right, piercing faintly through the murk, were two faint interweaving beams of white that preceded a slowly moving dark bulk.
The Narwhal! Wild hopes of rescue coursed through him.
Dimly, as he watched the beams, he was aware of the rest of the creatures dropping down, guiding between them the whale's carcass. Then a firm pressure was applied to his side, and he was rolled over, face down in the mud. Unable any longer to see his ship, his momentary vision of rescue vanished.
"Hopeless, I guess," he muttered despairingly. The darkness on the sea-floor was too thick, the wavering shadows too deceptive. And his hand-flash and knife were gone—probably knocked from his grasp during the struggle, he thought.
He realized that the seal-like animals were lying low until the submarine passed, its size having awed them. The color of the bodies blended perfectly with the gloom, as did that of his own sea-suit. His bonds prevented him from making even the slightest movement to attract attention.
Torturing thoughts raced through the torpooner's brain. He saw, in his mind's eye, straight above, a hazy bulk, with shimmering columns of white angling from its nose. His imagination pictured for him the warm, well-lit interior, and the bunks—the coffee steaming on the fire, the men at their posts and Streight's anxious, beefy face. He saw it all as plainly as if he were inside, cracking jokes with one of the engineers.