In minutes the _Esperance_, her engine rumbling, pulled away from the dock. She had on board all her original company except Deirdre--firmly left ashore by her father and Terry--and in addition she carried Dr. Morton and the most enthusiastic amateur photographer of the tracking station staff. He was shaky but resolute, and was hanging about with an imposing array of cameras, for both still and motion pictures. The _Esperance's_ sails were furled and she went into battle under bare poles. Davis was busy manufacturing improvised hand grenades for himself and Morton. The sun was nearly overhead. Terry asked Morton questions about the lagoon. They finally chose a minor inlet as the place to which the creature must be driven, if possible. There it could be immobilized by the intolerable sound from the recorder. There it could be destroyed. "I wonder," said Morton wryly, "if I can present a dead giant squid as part of the explanation for my computed orbits for the last two bolides!" The _Esperance_ moved steadily toward the place where Terry had nearly been killed. The enterprise was risky. The _Esperance_ was sixty-five feet long. The creature it was to attack was much larger, and if one of its kind had crushed the bathyscaphe, it had sufficient strength and ferocity to make a battle cruiser a much more suitable antagonist. But the true folly of the effort was its purpose. It all started when a fishing boat--_La Rubia_--went to sea and caught remarkable quantities of fish, of which four specimens had had plastic artefacts fastened to them. Then Terry began checking on certain noises he heard in the sea which provoked an incomprehensible crowding of millions of fish into a small area, from which they swam down to depths where they could not survive. Now the killing of this squid was supposed to cast a light on the mystery of the nine bolides which had fallen into a particular part of the ocean. Terry had the undersea horn turned vertically so that it would transmit a blade of sound wherever he aimed it, instead of spreading all through the lagoon. He turned it on. The water before the _Esperance_ suddenly speckled and splashed from the maddened leaps of fish of every possible size. He turned it off. He aimed it where the ripples showed the presence of something huge beneath the surface. He turned it on again. There were convulsive writhings. A long tentacle emerged briefly and then splashed under again. The writhings continued. Terry adjusted his aim. Crazy leapings of smaller creatures showed the line of the sound-beam, as tracer-bullets show the paths of bullets from a machine gun. He cut off the sound for an instant and turned it on again at full volume, pointed where the monster must be. There was explosive tumult underwater. Huge arms flailed above the surface. But once again the creature fled.