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sea-beasts, Bendle had said, although many of them had patches of skin responsive to light and dark.
    It might not be able to harm him, Lex thought. But those claws looked unpleasantly powerful. Besides, it would not be good for Aldric and Cheffy to find this thing swarming up into the boat. It was about four feet long, and a nip or bite from it might be as poisonous to man as human flesh apparently was to the local creatures.
    He readied his hatchet. Then, as the beast decided his arm offered a better course than continuing up the cable, he swung the blade and severed the first six or eight of its clawed legs, expecting it to fall.
    Instantly, the fronded bag at the rear of the creature burst open and the water turned a filthy yellow color Which blinded him completely within seconds. Startled, Lex lost his grip on the cable and began to fall toward the bottom.
    As soon as he was out of the yellow cloud, he twisted around and saw it from a few yards away, a misshapen ball. Out of it, like darts, plunged a score or more of stiff, wriggling-legged miniatures of the thing he had attacked. All of them were heading toward him. He flailed the hatchet violently, beating them off as he tumbled in the water, but two of them attached themselves to his faceplate. He saw how their little leech-mouths opened wide, spread to a diameter of two inches, began to fold back as if the creatures were going to turn completely inside-out.
    His feet found bottom. He straightened and clawed the creatures loose, hurling them from him as far as the resistance of the water would allow. By this time the mouths had folded back halfway along the bodies and the capacity to swim seemed to have been lost altogether. The things dropped among the weed and something—Lex couldn’t tell what because it moved so fast—engulfed them, emitting a moment later a jet of the ubiquitous yellow ink.
    Lex was beginning to regret his offhand decision to make this trip alone. He had never imagined such a totally unwelcoming environment. He had told himself many times during the past winter that now it was up to man to prove himself superior to the competing life-forms by being a more efficient animal. But here for thefirst time he was beginning to appreciate what the truism really implied.
    He was standing a few yards from the cargo lock, swaying because he had made himself too light for stability yet not light enough to float. The compromise might be satisfactory if it enabled him to make slow leaps like a man in barely perceptible gravity. His legs were calfdeep in the bottom-weed and his boot-soles apparently in squelchy mud, but he didn’t seem to be sinking in.
    Something passed between him and the gleaming roof of the surface. He glanced up and saw a pulsing creature with a flat planelike body and clusters of irregularly-distributed tentacles dangling beneath. It took no notice of him. Several other creatures, large and small, were likewise pursuing their own affairs overhead.
    Well, if they ignored him, he’d ignore them. He aimed himself at the cargo lock. A carefully-judged leap, dreamlike in the water, brought him with a slight bump against the upper left corner of the opening where he could grip a projection and look inside.
    All the time he had spent here, in crudely-rigged metal-framed bunks hard as tables, came back to memory. This had been the hold in which four hundred men had been crammed for the voyage. Sand had sifted across the tilted floor, and patching it now were weeds and little round sessile animals with fernlike filter-mouths which sorted drifting plankton from the water. On the walls clung sucker-rooted colonies of symbiotic cell-associations, vaguely similar to stranded algae.
    Already the ship was becoming a water-jungle. Lex knew at that first glance that salvage operations were going to take much of this long summer, and at that it was a tossup whether power-tools could be brought down to reclaim the valuable metals from the hull