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wounds, and the mines nagged him also, dragging him from side to side. The chain clinked dully on his head, caught in some stub of a harpoon. All this made him hostile to any life he saw. His dives and his surfacings were slowed by the accursed weights, and on his journey north, he forgot that the weights on him had the power to ward off enemies, until he encountered a certain whaling ship. It had sighted his blow, and at once borne down on him.
    Underwater, the whale made a slow arc that would bring him behind the vessel. Then he went on, northward. But the ship was just as near when the whale next came up for air. Without his weights, he thought he could have out-distanced it, been free of it! The ship with its white-frothed prow bore down, and the whale heard the clink of steel and the shouts of men aboard. In anger the whale slashed his tail and aimed for the black hull, but at the last moment he veered nervously left, just brushing the ship with his underbelly, and at once he dived deep.
    He heard the dull crack of a harpoon gun.
    Louder and deeper came an explosion on his right. The loosely dragging mine on his right had struck the hull of the ship. The timed bomb in the harpoon gun went off harmlessly somewhere to one side and beneath the whale.
    The ship had a big rent in it below the water level. It quickly began to sink. Two lifeboats managed to float out, with men aboard, and they picked up other men who were yelling and flailing about in the sea.
    The whale swam away from all the confusion, and went on northward. There was now a perceptible difference in weight between his right and left drags: a mine on his right side had disappeared, maybe two had.
    The whale left a wake of horror stories, each hanging on the story that had gone before. The ship he had hit was Japanese. There were nine survivors out of a crew of twenty, so fast had the whaler gone down. Their radioman tapped out his message until he was drowned in mid-sentence: STRUCK BY WHALE BEARING MINES. RAPIDLY SINKING LATITUDE . . . . He had given his position first and had been repeating it with his SOS but, when rescue came, there was nothing to be found save the two lonely lifeboats and their nine. The local seas were alerted against the killer whale. The rescued sailors could not tell how many mines the whale had been carrying, whole chains of them on both sides of him at any rate.
    Whalers were asked to destroy the whale at any cost, in their own interests. The whale would be slow because of the mines on him, but he was extremely dangerous, like an armed madman. It made a spectacular news story, even though there were no pictures.
    Within twenty-four hours, a hunt was on, and whalers were using searchlights at night to scan the sea’s surface. The strategy of the Japanese and Russian vessels was to keep in touch by radio, to go about their usual business but, if the whale was sighted, to announce it to the other ships at once. Then they would encircle the whale and fire harpoon guns and also possibly detonate some of the mines.
    The whale was next sighted two hundred nautical miles north of where the Japanese vessel had sunk. The time was 2 in the morning, the dead of night in November in the northern hemisphere, and there was no moon. But the converging ships, some at greater distance than others from their objective, made the seascape almost light, or at least as if flooded with moonlight, milky, grey. The port lights of the little ships weaved and bobbed like drops of blood in the eerie theater of battle, which covered hundreds of meters at first.
    The whale was aware of the lights above him, of the churning noises of the ships’ motors which came gradually closer, louder in his ears. He was tired to the point of illogic and desperation. First one ship had pursued him, then a second, and now perhaps there were eight or nine. He was aware that they formed a ring around him. Nothing like this had ever happened before. He breathed while he could, in