Chapter II

The tribes from which Moljar came were fatalists. Moljar accepted the fact that he was face to face with imminent death. Very well. If there was a way out, he would find it. If not, he would go on to Khles, where dead warriors go. And from Khles he would fight his way into the eternal paradise of Perlarh.

He had expected the gyro to float at least a few minutes. But it sank almost immediately. The shock of the crash had knocked Mahra unconscious; pulling her against the suction as the gyro went under was a herculean task. The crumbled wreckage went down. It left only a tiny whirlpool in its wake.

Mahra's consciousness returned quickly after a few dunkings in the tepid water. She was in his arms, her silver hair floating out over the dull glassy sheen of the water. He treaded easily, looking about. They could see a few hundred metres but beyond that narrow radius, the cloud blankets became an impenetrable fog. Patches of seaweed, lichen and rotting debris floated silently by on the torpid water, giving off a phosphorescent glow that reflected weirdly against the backdrop of mist.

Nature seemed to have stopped breathing. The air was heavy, oppressive. And the high humidity and heat, unrelieved by any wind, was weighty and pressed on them.

"Can you swim?" he asked.

"Quite well." Her hands were on his shoulders. They clung a moment, then shoved away.

Treading water now as easily as he, she asked, "How long do you give us to live? Not that it matters."

"The future is a mystery to me," he said. "Maybe a second. Maybe a hundred years."

"But you'll admit we've no chance now! Soon hordes of sea monsters will scent us out. Surely you'll not deny that this time you will go to meet your barbaric gods!"

"Who knows?"

She cursed him thoroughly. "You're mad!"

"I am Moljar."

She sighed resignedly. "You say that like omnipotence would say, 'I'm God'."

"It is enough for me. Who can say they know of more than themselves? I simply know I am Moljar. I live. I have purpose. The pelt of Alhone. A pledge I must keep. Beyond that--nothing."

She tossed wet hair from her eyes. "Maybe your barbaric code is best after all. The System's returned to barbarism. Decay, ruin. Why not a philosophy to fit it? I rather like you. If you only weren't a half-breed."

He grinned. "If you only were not a mutant." His eyes caught a dark, flat floating object some distance away. A blurred, indistinct outline. He pointed.

"Looks like something large enough to float us," she said. Then she cried out suddenly and pointed over his shoulder.

His knife was in his hands as his legs churned him around in the brackish water. The sea-serpent's flat head arched high above them, dripping an avalanche of weed and water upon their upturned faces. Its sleek, sinuous body shot upward, a monster with fanged jaws and darting forked tongue, with bulging eyes, and bony head and snout.

"Keep diving," yelled Moljar. "It won't open its mouth under water." He watched her surface dive like a fish, then followed himself just as the bullet-like head of the hissing hydrophidian slashed down.

Its massive length coiled and uncoiled savagely about them. The water was a churning white foam. Moljar tried repeatedly to sink his knife into the under-belly of the serpent. But it was like soft but tough plastic, only slightly resilient.

He broke surface, gasped great gulps of the dense air. He saw Mahra and pointed to the right toward the flat raft object they had seen floating there. He yelled. "Keep diving and swimming toward that." Then he went under again as the serpent's head slapped into the water where his own head had been.

It was a world of phosphorescent glimmerings like monstrous fireflies, bubbling and coruscating about his staring eyes as he battled the boiling currents stirred by the serpent. He swam until his lungs were shrieking with agony, then came up again for air. He was only a few feet this time from the floating area. It looked like a collected mass of debris now.

He swam frantically toward it. If he could get up out of the water, he could break out his electro-gun. He looked around for the girl. Her head bobbed up. But still some distance from him. The hydrophidian hissed angrily and struck again. Her silver hair disappeared beneath the serpent's mouth.

He drew himself up onto the raft. He had a quick second of appraisal as he tore the gun from its plastic wrappings. The raft was solid, very buoyant, and membranaceous. Its surface was glossy and veined like the broad leaves of the swamp lilies.

How thick this raft was, how it was made, or how much more of it there was Moljar had no time to think about. But he did know it was alive!

The girl came up a few metres from him this time. Her arms moved weakly. Her face was deathly pale and her eyes pleaded silently beneath the bizarre strands of her silver hair. She again started to sink wearily down as the serpent hissed hungrily and struck.

This time it would have feasted. However Moljar's electro-gun crackled, and its lethal charges burned the monster's glistening length into pieces. They fell writhing in separate anguish all around the girl, crimsoning the water to a thick red.

He lifted her easily up onto the raft-creature. She sank down in a dripping and exhausted heap.

"For a half-breed," she whispered between gasps, "you have courage." Then she closed her eyes. The raft rippled and bucked slightly as something huge stirred against its bottom.

* * * * *

The night hours before morning were illuminated, a strange twilight of phosphorescence. They sat in the middle of the organic raft and waited tensely. The stirring beneath it had grown more violent.

"Man isn't the only highly adaptable animal--not even the most ingenious." The girl's tone was pedantic, amazingly learned. Moljar nodded surlily, not so interested, apparently, in lectures. He edged toward the girl until their shoulders touched. She paused. Continued.

"The animal that build this raft for itself is hiding beneath it now. The serpent frightened it. Soon it will have to come up for air."

"How do you know so much," he growled.

"Earth University of Interplanetary Fauna," she said.

He sneered. "A mutant!"

"My parents dyed my hair, and with another name I got by for a while. I was going to be a field worker, but they caught up with me. They always do. Anyway, as I was saying, this creature is much like an ianthina, or snail, of earth. It breathes through a siphon, or tubular proboscis. It uses this siphon to suck in air with which it builds these rafts for itself, to keep its heavy body and shell afloat. It's an adventurer like you, Moljar. It spends its life floating or sailing about like a ship."

Moljar grunted. He moved one corded arm behind her. She shifted a little.

"Very interesting thing," she said. "Biology. When this ianthina decides to build its raft, it exudes a sticky mucous over the surface of the sea, layer after layer of it. Then it draws air into its siphon and permits the bubbles to escape beneath the mucous to which they cling. These air sacks imprison the air as the mucous hardens. And we have this very strong raft, a life boat with air tanks. Aren't we lucky?"

The raft jolted violently. "Are we?" said Moljar. "Maybe it does not want to share its raft."

A number of tentacles slithered up and over the edge of the raft. Two antenna with slimy knobs stood up and quivered at Moljar.

The girl tried to ignore the sight. "But this raft is better than any man has ever been able to build." Her voice tightened as more of the ianthina surged into view. "This snail can make more bubbles at will, and it can enlarge its raft whenever it wants to."

There was a sudden upsurging height of gigantic pink-fleshed bulk. It rose up until it towered over its raft. A little above the level of the water they could see its brilliantly colored spiral shell-house gleaming olive-green with streaks and spots of purple, violet and black.

The body of the ianthina continued to exude outward from its shell. From it a thick tendon of flesh spread out to either side to form the frame work of its raft, an integral part of its giant body.

"We've got to get this craft moving someway toward Anghore," said Moljar.

She stared at him, open mouthed, and then said, "Is that all? How will you summon your genii, or is that you?"

He shrugged. "It must be done. We are wasting time. First we must burn this shell away from the raft. It encumbers us."

She was shaking her head as he crouched on his knees, leveling the gun at a point beneath the ianthina's waving antenna. He was about to press the stud, then cursed and fell sidewise beneath the long descending squeal.

* * * * *

Attracted by the glow of the ianthina, a monstrous bat had dived suddenly toward them from somewhere up in that dense grey curtain. Neither of them saw its giant webbed wings until it fanned them like an abrupt deadly wind.

"Burn it!" scream Mahra, as the bat's hideous evilly grinning mouth opened to reveal rows of yellowed teeth, and its gleaming red eyes bored toward them through the mist. "I lost my electro in the water."

Moljar was shaking his head. He tossed her the blaster. "You. Burn the ianthina free from the raft." The bat had sped by, circled, was returning. "This bat can do us some good!"

Moljar stood up and met the sweep of the bat's flexing claws. Just in time he leaped upward between them, and clutched the bat's thick furred belly. He felt the ratty teeth clack shut behind him as he was raised upward into the swirling vapor.

His nose curled, and he choked with the stench of the beast's vermin-infested fur. Then, still gripping the coarse hair with one hand, he raised his knife with the other. A quick long slash brought a fearsome scream hissing in his face. He slashed again and again until the probing blade found the beast's heart.

Gore spilled over him as he clung to the now wet hair. It got too slippery to hold. He grabbed the flailing claws as the gasping, thrashing creature plummeted seaward. The bat's body flopped into the water not far from the raft. It beat futilely with one foot, spinning in weakening frothing circles. Suddenly it was dead.

Moljar worked frantically against time. The blood would attract every kind and condition of sea monster. He hacked and strained at the joint where the huge wing joined the body. The stench almost overpowered him as he floundered about. But finally the great ribbed wing came free. Moljar's breath was coming in deep gusts as he dragged himself up onto the raft and pulled part of the wing up after him. He sat on it to anchor it while he rested.

He looked at the girl. She nodded. "You're pretty brave, for a half-breed."

He grunted breathlessly.

She came closer and handed him his blaster. "I burned it away. I burned its ganglia first, which it used for a brain. Then I severed the tendons which fastened it to its float. Anything else?"

Moljar was up again now, hacking at the thick tough surface of one end of the raft. "Yes. Watch that bat wing. Don't let it slide away. It is what we must have to reach Anghore."

"What are you doing now? And what's the wing for?"

He answered carelessly, "I'm going to make us a sail from the wing. It is almost a perfect sail of its kind. I figure the gyro brought us halfway across the sea. Maybe we have a third of the way to go. I have a compass and I saw what direction we were following before we crashed. With a fair wind, and luck, we should reach shore within a day."

She stared with no attempt, now, to conceal her admiration for the barbarian. "For a half-breed," she said, "you've got a brain."

Moljar said nothing. He had finished digging the hole in the surface of the raft. He next cut long strips of leather from his tunic for rigging. The twenty-foot-high leading edge of the bat's wing, a high curving spar, he stepped deeply in the hole, like a mast. Soon they were moving through the fantastic sea before a slight, lethargic breeze.

Their blaster protected them many times from the countless varieties of sea and air creatures that constantly attacked them. Moljar devised a sea-anchor by cutting off one of the air sacks from beneath the raft, and tying it to one end of a long leather rope. When the wind blew in the wrong direction, he threw out the sea-anchor.

There was little difference between night and day, except that the phosphorescence dimmed and was replaced by a grayer, more sickly light. And the high, gracefully-curved membrane of the bat's ribbed wing arched above them like the bizarre rigging of the junks that ply the Martian canals between the ruins of Phreer and Sumph-Logan. Black, with veins of dried blood, it caught the wind and tautened like the black sails of ancient pirate craft.

But though they could fight the monsters that flew and swam about them they could not fight the sea itself. The sea is cunning. It can bide its time, and spring with more violence than the greatest beast. The wind was its ally.

It was late the following afternoon that Mahra's hypersensitive nerves detected the distant pounding of the surf against high crags. They both visualized the dark mountains of Maghrone where the dull spires and minarets of Anghore towered up from its granite sea wall thousands of feet into the mist.

The thunderous surf grew in volume to a steady roaring as their makeshift craft bore them shoreward.

Then, abruptly, Moljar's nostrils quivered. He leaped to his feet and his black mane matted and curled as his eyes strained upward. "The cloud layers," he said. "Look!"

Each cloud layer was moving rapidly in different directions. "A storm!" cursed Moljar. "The wind and sea will pulp us on the rocks!"

Mahra cowered down, clutching at the floor of the raft. One hand gripped the bone mast of the bat's wing. She reached up the other, and Moljar's broad yellow hand closed over it, and held it in a silent bond.

The sound of the descending storm came from afar. It rose higher and higher, reaching the pitch of a thousand shrieking giants. A colossal comber bore toward them, lifting up, and up. Their eyes followed its curling summit, helpless, bold pygmies. A wall of blue, foaming with white like a mad beast, translucent as they saw it towering up through the swirling vapor. Then it collapsed over them.

Moljar's hand gripped hers. A vise that all the frenzied pounding of the ocean could not break. As the tons of water crushed them down, shattered the raft, hurled it away like chaff, their hands were locked. Their ears rang. Their minds cried out and were smothered. Coughing, blinded, they were absorbed by the sea.