He did not attempt to eject its mangled remains from the ship; it might be necessary to use them as food later on, though the idea was unpleasant. The Hunter's attitude toward the animal resembled that of a man toward a favorite dog, though the perit, with its delicate hands which it had learned to use at his direction much as an elephant uses its trunk at the behest of man, was more useful than any dog.

He extended his exploration a little, reaching out with a slender pseudopod of jellylike flesh through one of the rents in the hull. He already knew that the wreck was lying in salt water, but he had no idea of the depth other than the fact that it was not excessive. On his home world he could have judged it quite accurately from the pressure; but pressure depends on the weight of a given quantity of water as well as its depth, and he had not obtained a reading of this planet's gravity before the crash.

It was dark outside the hull. When he molded an eye from his own tissue-those of the pent had been ruptured -it told him absolutely nothing of his surroundings. Suddenly, however, he realized that the pressure around him was not constant; it was increasing and decreasing by a rather noticeable amount with something like regularity; and the water was transmitting to his sensitive flesh the higher-frequency pressure waves which he interpreted as sound. Listening intently, he finally decided that he must be fairly close to the surface of a body of water large enough to develop waves a good many feet in height, and that a storm of considerable violence was in progress. He had not noticed any disturbance in the air during his catastrophic descent, but that meant nothing-he had spent too little time in the atmosphere to be affected by any reasonable wind.

Poking into the mud around the wreck with other pseudopods, he found to his relief that the planet was not lifeless-he had already been pretty sure of that fact.