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.
„In other words,” he said, half to himself, „your oceans evaporate steadily forever four of my years, precipitating fro7en methane on the north polar cap, and then get it afl back in the five months or so that the northern hemisphere spends going from its spring to autumn. If I was ever surprised at those storms, that ends it.” He returned to more immediate matters.
„Barl, I’m going to get out of this tin box. I’ve been wanting samples of the tissue of Mesklin’s animal life ever since we found it existed, and I couldn’t very well take a paring from you. Will the flesh of this thing be very badly changed in the length of time it has probably been dead? I suppose you’d have some idea.”
„It should still be perfectly edible for us, though from what you have said you could never digest it. Meat usually becomes poisonous after a few hundred days unless it is dried or otherwise preserved, and during all that time its taste gradually changes. I’ll sample a bit of this, if you’d like.” Without waiting for an answer and without even a guilty glance around to make sure that none of his crew had wandered in this direction, Barlennan launched himself from the roof of the tank toward the vast bulk beside it. He misjudged badly, sailing entirely over the huge body, and for just an instant felt a twinge of normal panic; but he was in full control of himself before he landed on the farther side. He leaped back again, judging his distance better this time, and waited while Lackland opened the door of his vehicle and emerged. There was no air lock on the tank; the man was still wearing pressure armor, and had simply permitted Mesklin’s atmosphere to enter after closing his helmet. A faint swirl of white crystals followed him out — ice and carbon dioxide, frozen out of the Earth-type air inside as it cooled to Mesklin’s bitter temperature. Barlennan had no sense of smell, but he felt a burning sensation in his breathing pores as a faint whiff of oxygen reached him, and jumped hastily backward. Lackland guessed correctly at the cause of his action and apologized profusely for not giving proper warning.
„It is nothing,” the captain replied. „I should have foreseen it — I got the same sensation once before when you left the Hill where you live, and you certainly told me often enough how the oxygen you breathe differs from our hydrogen — you remember, when I was learning your language.”
„I suppose that’s true. Still, I could hardly expect a person who hasn’t grown up accustomed to the idea of different worlds and different atmospheres to remember the possibility all the time. It was still my fault. However, it seems to have done you no harm; I don’t yet know enough about the life chemistry of Mesklin even to guess just what it might do to you. That’s why I want samples of this creature’s flesh.”
Lackland had a number of instruments in a mesh pouch on the outside of his armor, and while he was fumbling among them with his pressure gauntlets Barlennan proceeded to take the first sample. Four sets of pincers shredded a portion of skin and underlying tissue and passed it along to his mouth; for a few moments he chewed reflectively.
„Not at all bad,” he remarked at last. „If you don’t need all of this thing for your tests, it might be a good idea to call the hunting parties over here. They’d have time to make it before the storm gets going again, I should think, and there’ll certainly be more meat than they could reasonably expect to get any other way.”
„Good idea,” Lackland grunted. He was giving only part of his attention to his companion; most of it was being taken up by the problem of getting the point of a scalpel into the mass before him. Even the suggestion that he might be able to use the entire monstrous body in a laboratory investigation — the Mesklinite did possess a sense of humor — failed to distract him.
He had known, of course, that living tissue on this planet must be extremely tough. Small as Barlennan and his people were, they would have been flattened into senseless pulp under Mesklin’s polar gravity had their flesh been of mere Earthly consistency. He had expected some difficulty in getting an instrument through the monster’s skin; but he had more or less unthinkingly assumed that, once through, his troubles would be over in that respect. He was now discovering his error; the meat inside seemed to have the consistency of teak. The scalpel was of a superhard alloy which would have been difficult to dull against anything as long as mere muscular strength was employed, but he could not drive it through that mass and finally had to resort to scraping. This produced a few shreds which he sealed in a collecting bottle.