There was nothing in the water, nothing. Not a body, not a person struggling to keep afloat, no sign of the boats. There was not even floating cargo although some of the packages would float. I knew; I had packed some of them.
Janet was standing next to me, shaking with dry sobs. I said stupidly, “What happened?”
She tried to control herself and said shakily, “I don’t know. I saw one of them get Otto. It just…it just-” She started to bawl again and turned away.
There wasn’t anything on the water, but now I saw that there was something in the water, under it. From high up you can see down into water if it is fairly smooth; arranged around the ship in orderly ranks were things of some sort. They looked like whales-or what I think a whale would look like in water; I’ve never seen a whale;
I was just getting it through my confused head that I was looking at the creatures who had destroyed the boats when somebody yelled and pointed. On shore the people who were to return were still on the beach, but they were no longer alone-they were surrounded. The things had come ashore, on each side of them and had flanked them. I could not see well at that distance but I could see the sea creatures because they were so much bigger than we were. They didn’t have legs, so far as I could tell, but it did not slow them down-they were fast.
And our people were being herded into the water.
There was nothing we could do about it, not anything. Under us we had a ship that was the end product of centuries of technical progress; its torch could destroy a city in the blink of an eye. Ashore the guard had weapons by which one man was equal to an army of older times and there were more such weapons somewhere in the ship. But at the time I did not even know where the armory was, except that it was somewhere in the auxiliary deck-you can live a long time in a ship and never visit all her compartments.
I suppose I should have been down in the auxiliary deck, searching for weapons. But what I did was stand there, frozen, with a dozen others, and watch it happen.
But somebody had been more alert than I had been. Two men came bursting up through the hatch; they threw down two ranger guns and started frantically to plug them in and break open packages of ammunition. They could have saved the effort; by the time they were ready to sight in on the enemy, the beach was as empty as the surface of the water. Our shipmates had been pushed and dragged under. The helicopter was hovering over the spot; its rescue ladder was down but there was no one on it.
The helicopter swung around over the island and across our camp site, then returned to the ship.
While it was moving in to touch down, Chet Travers hurried up the ladder. He looked around, saw me and said, “Tom, where’s the Captain?”
“In the chopper.”
“Oh.” He frowned. “Well, give him this. Urgent. I’ve got to get back down.” He shoved a paper at me and disappeared. I glanced at it, saw that it was a message form, saw who it was from, and grabbed the Captain’s arm as he stepped out of the heli.
He shrugged me off. “Out of my way!”
“Captain, you’ve got to-it’s a message from the island-from Major Lucas.”
He stopped then and took it from me, then fumbled for his reading glasses, which I could see sticking out of a pocket. He shoved the dispatch form back at me before I could help him and said, “Read it to me, boy.”
So I did. “ ‘From: Commander Ship’s Guard-To: Commanding Officer Lewis and Clark-Oh nine three one-at oh nine oh five survey camp was attacked by hostile natives, believed to be amphibious. After suffering initial heavy losses the attack was beaten off and I have withdrawn with seven survivors to the hilltop north of the camp. We were forced to abandon survey craft number two. At time of attack, exchange party was waiting on beach; we are cut off from them and their situation is not known but must be presumed to be desperate.