The Murderer had been well aware of tusks. For three days he had been studying the walrus herd with fascination. These staring-eyed, noisy mammals were living in icy water that would numb and kill a man in a few minutes. Some of them were diving to clam beds more than two hundred and fifty feet down, where their bodies were subjected to a pressure of more than eight atmospheres. In shallower water, where cockles predominated, he had actually observed them raking the muddy bottom with their tusks and rising with great disintegrating masses of mud and shells between their flippers. Few men had ever seen that. He marveled at the evolutionary process by which some primitive land mammal of the Eocene Period had become the walrus. * * * * * Why he had swum down and attacked a walrus, he did not know. Afterward he felt ashamed, not just because it was a dumb thing to do and he'd had three ribs cracked and should have been killed; not because it was a show-off thing, with sailors urging him to stand in front of its hoisted body so they could take pictures for their girl friends; not because Barney lost his appetite for a couple of days and didn't seem very eager to dive near the herd. What bothered him was the indescribable feeling he'd had as he swam down with his knife to the walrus, a feeling closer than hunger.... "When we get back, I'll show you the photographs," Barney was insisting proudly. "When they assigned this boy as my diving buddy, they sent his name along, Murderer. If it swims. Murderer will go down after it, they said. And they weren't lying." But that was _not_ how the name originated. Sitting there in the drifting cigarette smoke, feeling the sweat soak through his longjohns, the Murderer wished the submarine's commander would hurry up and decide on a position, let them out of the boat, get it over with. Probably by now, even the guys who were in U.D.T. training with him believed he got the name by murdering fish. _They_ gave the name to him, but it was during an orientation meeting with diagrams and graphs and talk of megatons and current-borne radioactivity and a model of an atomic depth charge on the table. An incredulous revulsion had come over him, this mindlessly mechanical can of death that could poison, could make _useless_ two billion struggling years of life, all wasted, single-celled ancestors, diatoms, copepods, wondrous fish. During the discussion, he had kept exclaiming: "It's _murder_! It's _murder_!" This was how he had acquired his name. "Hey, Murderer," one of the submariners laughed. "You should cut off a sea serpent steak for the skipper. I bet he'd go for one."