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The Booragangahn fleet was enwrapped in tentacles. Each ship had been pulled downward until it was half-enfolded in billowing flesh. The lower masts had pierced the body of the Beast, but evidently this did not perturb it. Its tentacles were in every opening of every vessel, and several vessels were broken open when the Beast discharged some of its "ca
Ishmael transmitted more orders to his fleet. Those that had gotten away were to descend and help their trapped fellows. His own ship tacked and discharged gas at the same time, sliding about fifty feet above one of their vessels, the Mowkurree, which had not been able to pull loose. More bombs were dropped, some of which exploded so close to the ship they tore apart beams and walkways or started fires on the skin. But the Mowkurree was released. Its fore lifted up first, the tentacles sliding off and then collapsing from it, and then the aft lifted, and the ship was free.
More great bladders exploded. A Booragangahn ship was released when an explosion blew up a part of the Beast immediately by the ship. It rose at an angle and then rolled over on its side. Its starboard masts had been broken off by the blast, and the weight of the port masts was tilting it. Little figures fell onto the Beast fifty feet below. Some sailors had lost their holds when the vessel rolled.
Ishmael did not waste any bombs on the crippled ship. It was out of the action. Though it could still probably put out boats, these would be filled with men eager to get away from this area, not to board enemy craft. Namalee cried out, and Ishmael turned. She was staring at one of their ships, which had passed too low over a series of exploding bladders. One of the flaming cells had been cast upward and had struck the lower part of the ship. Fire spread quickly, since the bladder seemed to cling to the hull. One of the ship's bladders was burned away, and the ship fell aft end first into the inferno below. One boat escaped, only to be caught by two tentacles. These pulled downward; the boat tilted, turned upside down, and several men who had not had time to strap themselves in fell out. But they died only a minute ahead of their fellows. The boat was pulled down into the smoke and not seen thereafter.
"The Beast is dying!" Namalee said. She looked at Ishmael. "You did it! You did what none except Zalarapamtra has ever been able to do! You are a god!"
"I am a man," he said. "Others will be slaying their Beasts, once they know how to make firebombs."
"The Beast is not dead yet!" Poonjakee said hoarsely.
He pointed downward and they saw scores of pieces of the Beast flying up through the smoke. They were borne by small bladders and carried a dozen tentacles each.
The Beast, dying, had broken itself up into many parts, capable of independent action. They extended parts of their skin to form sails and crude rudders, and they came as one toward the Roolanga. These, perhaps, were the smaller animals supposed to accompany the Beast.
Ishmael gave orders that the archers should shoot at the bladders of the creatures. The spearmen should cast their spears. And then he waited with his spear.
Three of the creatures grabbed the end of the starboard yardarms and hauled themselves along them until they reached the hull. There, finding no entrances unguarded, they made their own. Flaps of skin opened on the sides to reveal lipless mouths with thousands of sharp triangular teeth. These bit at the skin of the hull until they tore open the tough but thin material. Then the purplish, pulsing, billowing bodies elongated, and their tentacles reached through the openings, gripping beams and catwalks, and they pulled themselves through.
Sailors met them, were seized by the tentacles, cut the tentacles, were gripped again, hauled yelling to the mouths, and their heads or arms were bitten off.
But others rammed their weapons into the mouths or punctured the bladders, which expelled the gas swiftly. Other sailors ran up with torches, which Ishmael had ordered lit, and thrust into the tentacles. These were burned away or writhed away, and the torches were stuck into the mouths of the creatures.
Abruptly the three were gone. They had pulled themselves back out and dropped off, acting as if they still had full gas bladders. Their tentacles writhing, they fell down into the smoke still pouring out from the huge dead mass of the Beast.
Other independent pieces of the Beast had attacked the Roolanga at other points. But these, though they had taken their toll, had been killed or repulsed. And the other Zalarapamtran ships had also gotten rid of their boarders.
Ishmael said to Poonjakee, "We will pick up the Booragangahns in the boats, if they will surrender. We will spare their lives and take them back to Booragangah."
"Are you sick?" Namalee cried. "Has the hideousness of the Beast overcome your senses? You would have us give mercy to those killers and return them unharmed to their people? So they can thrive and grow strong again and then come to Zalarapamtra one day and murder us all again?"
"I have been thinking for a long time, since the chase was long, and there was much time to think," Ishmael said. "The people of Zalarapamtra are very few. And though the people of Booragangah outnumber them, they are very few too. It will take generations to build their population back to where it was. Both people will be subject to raids, perhaps to extermination, by other peoples. Both will be unprotected when the whaling vessels put out to the air, since most of the male population will have to go out.
"It is unheard of!" Namalee and Poonjakee cried with one voice.
"Ah, but I am a new voice!" Ishmael said. "And I have said several things you have never heard of! And I will be saying more unheard-of things!"
"But the gods!" Namalee said. "What will Zoomashmarta say? How could he endure to share equally with Kashmangai?"
Ishmael smiled and said, "They are sharing equal quarters and the same fate now in the belly of the stone beast. Indeed, the stone beast may be the greatest of the gods, since he carries two great ones in his body.
"It was this swallowing of the two that gave me the idea of combining the two peoples. Let Zalarapamtran and Booragangahn live together, in peace, with a united front against enemies. Let them worship Zoomashmarta and Kashmangai together. Perhaps the stone beast will be a god higher than they, I do not know what its name is, but the Booragangahns must have one for it. Or, if not, let us give it a name. The gods have always had names which men have given them."
All except Time, Ishmael thought. There have been gods of time, but no name for Time itself. And he thought of that fierce and old man with the ivory leg and the lightning streak down his face and body. Old Ahab, whose doomed pursuit of the white beast with the wrinkled forehead and the crooked jaw had been more than just a desire for vengeance against a dumb animal.
"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event -- in the living act, the undoubted deed -- there, some unknown but still unreasoning thing puts forth the moldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!"
What the white whale had been to Ahab, he told himself again, time was to Ishmael.
And the six-inch blade striking to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale was man's mind striving to comprehend the nature of time and timelessness. It could not be done. It ended with the defeat of the quester, as Ahab's quest had ended. Man could only live as well as he could with the greatest beast, Time, and then go into timelessness, still wondering, still uncomprehending.