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.Whatever the reason, I was breathing bad air.Something shoved against my back, sent mesprawling.I heard a distant giant roar, rumblingthrough the water, and looked around to see that all ofus had been tumbled about like straw men.Gideon picked himself up and waved back toward theDolphin.At once I understood.The Dolphin's overwrought reactors had finally let go.Back behind us, a nuclear explosion had ripped thedead ship's hulk into atoms.Thank heaven we were across the last ridge and out ofrange!We picked ourselves up and moved on. We were skirting the edge of an old lava flow,where molten stone from a sub-sea volcano hadfrozen into black, grotesque shapes.The weirdlygleaming sea-plants709were all about us, growing out of the bare rockitself, it seemed.I glanced at them then again.For a moment it seemed I had seen somethingmoving in there.Something huge.It was impossible to tell.The only light was fromthe plants themselves, and it concealed as much asit showed.I paused to look again and saw nothing;and then I had to speed up to catch up with the others.It was getting harder to put out a burst, of extra speed.There was no doubt about it now, the air in thesuit was growing worse.Down a long slope, and out over a plain.The glowingsea-plants still clustered thickly about us,everywhere.Above us the strange weeds made aragged curtain be-tween the black cliffs we had justpassed.David halted and waved ahead with a greatspread-armed gesture.I coughed, choked and tried to move forward.Then I realized that he was not calling for me tomove up to the front of the column; Laddy Angel wasalready there.David was showing us something.I lifted my head to look.And there, peepingthrough the gaps in the sea-plants ahead, I could see the looming bulk of something enormous andblack.A sea-mount! And atop it, like the gold onthe Academy dome, a pale, blue glow shining.Edenite! The.glow was the dome of Jason Craken!But I wondered if it were in time.Someone I couldn't tell who stumbled andfell, struggled to get up, finally stood wavering,even buoyed up by the water.Someoneelse Gideon, I thought leaped to his side andsteadied him with an arm.Evidently it was not only my air which was going bad.We moved ahead once more but slower now,and keeping closer together.Out of the corner of my eye I saw that flicker ofmovement again.I looked, expecting to see nothing ----I was terribly, terribly wrong!What I saw was far from nothing.It had been afaint, furtive glimpse of something huge and menacing.noAnd when I looked at it straight on, it was stillthere huger, more menacing, real and tangible!It was a saurian, giant and strange, and it waspacing us.I turned on my suit-lamps, flooded the otherswith light to attract their attention.I wavedfrantically toward the monster in the undersea jungle.And they saw.I could tell from the queer,contorted attitudes in which they stood that they saw.David Craken made a wild, excited gesture, but Icouldn't understand what he meant.The others, with one accord, leaped forward and scattered.AndI was with them all of us running, leaping,scurrying away in the slow, slow jumps the resistanceof the water allowed.We dodged in among the tall,gently wavering stems of the sea-plants, looking for ahiding place.I could hear my breath rasping inside the helmet,and the world was growing queerly black.There was apound-ing in my head and a dull ache; the air wasworse now, so bad that I was tempted to stop, torelax, to fall to the ground and rest, sleep, relax.I forced myself to squirm into the shelter of a clumpof brightly glowing bushes.I lay on my back there,breath-ing raggedly and hard, and noticed withoutworry, with-out emotion, that the huge, strangebeast was close upon me.Queer, I thought, it is justlike David's painting even to the rider on its back.There was something on its back no, notsomething, but someone.A person.A a girl figure,slight and frail, brown-skinned, black-haired, hereyes glowing white as Joe Trencher's, her blueswim-suit woven of something as luminous as the weed.She was close, so close that I could see herwide-flaring nostrils, see the expression on her face.It was easy enough to see, for she wore nopressure suit! Here four miles down, she wasbreathing the water of the Deeps!But I had no time to study her, for the monstershe rode took all my attention.Even in the poisonedcalm of my slow suffocation, I knew that here was deadly danger.The enormous head was swayingdown toward me, the great supple neck curving likea swan's.Its open mouth711could have swallowed me in a single bite; its teethseemed long as cavalry sabers.The blue-gleaming forest turned gray-black andwhirled about me.I could see the detail of overlapping scales on thearmored neck of the saurian, the enormous black clawsthat tipped its great oarlike limbs.The gigantic head came down through the torn strandsof shining weed, and I thought I had come to mylast port
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