He took the muddy squirming figure of the girl between his unhinged jaws, delicately, but firmly. He accomplished this in an incomparable burst of energy, continuing on through the finish of the move without a stop. His body shot beneath the whipping tentacles of the _Torrg_, toward the SHIP that waited helplessly for her return. He felt the _Torrg's_ suckers close on his back as he passed. There was no pausing to understand why he was exposing himself to certain defeat. One must get in the initial blow in his world, or lose. His instinct was guiding him. It had never yet failed him. Later, if he survived, he could reason out the problem. He sat the girl down gently, an inert lump just beneath the bow of the SHIP. Then he twisted around to try and rake the _Torrg_ from his back. He had put himself wholly into the mad mindless power of the _Torrg's_ blood-thirst. He kept trying to turn, but it seemed too late for that. He felt its twenty arms wrap about his throat and belly and flippers. Its monstrous weight crawled up his back. Two more of its appendages clinched about his jaws--his only means of destruction. He coiled and uncoiled, unleashing the full force of his great power. His body twisted, jerked over and over in lightning-fast, explosive arcs. Simultaneously he rolled in the direction of his swamp lake, at the bottom which he had lived for all his lonely life. Disengaged appendages of the _Torrg_ swung and slapped thunderously against the swamp surface. Then the two were sliding down through the thick black depths of his swamp lake. In the tepid bubbling water their individual differences were largely canceled. Here they could battle to the ultimate decision. They sank down through the murky, swirling deeps, and he was curling and snapping his fifty _kimm_ until the entire expanse of his swamp lake churned and frothed, surging and boiling as though a steam fissure had blown open beneath it. Dead things floated up past them toward the surface and were promptly devoured by serpentine things. [Illustration: This was his last battle. His instinct told him that.] This was his last battle. His instinct told him that. Somehow, though, his instinct had failed him this time. Taking the girl back to her SHIP had been an error of instinct. He would never know why he had done it, because he would not have time to study the psychology of it. He felt the great holes being ripped in his belly where his flippers had been torn out. He felt his thick cold blood streaming out in rivers, thickening the swamp lake. He noted the darting lusting hunger of the intent school of killer snakes that were already swimming into the current of that blood, following up the direction of the final feeding. This knowledge drove him to the great effort that partially dislodged the appendages from about his jaws. His long sharp head speared around, closed about that part of the _Torrg_ from which its many eyes stared cold and lidless.