"You must have been looking solely for intelligence," Ronaro hastened to reassure his Captain. "There was none to find. Only primitive emotions."

Silently, Ekrado started the lifeboat on its long sweep through the waters. At the end of a hundred miles, he turned in a slow curve and headed back along a straight line parallel to the way they had come. Back and forth they combed through the blue-green water, systematically hunting some sign of intelligent life.

During this period, they several times encountered creatures similar to that which they had first thought might be like themselves. Each time hope rose again; and each time it came to nothing. Each such creature inspired in them a strange medley of emotions, a sense of kinship and yet of repugnance, a feeling at once of benevolence toward a more backward cousin mixed with exasperation.

After the futile search had gone on for several hours, Ronaro was struck with a sudden idea.

"Perhaps the intelligent races of this planet are deep-sea creatures," he suggested.

"It's possible," mused Ekrado. "So far I've been cruising pretty much at our own favorite depth."

"This lifeboat can stand tremendous pressure."

"We'll try it," decided Ekrado. The slender shape of the lifeboat wheeled over until it was pointing straight down toward the ocean bottom.

Soon there was a gradual change in the color of the water, fading from green to greenish blue and then to dark blue. Ronaro snapped on the searchlights at the Alarian equivalent of 700 feet and the yellow beams spread out into the dark blue waters on all sides. The pressure gauge showed them an ever increasing force pressing on all sides of their vessel, until, at 1700 feet, it had reached 770 pounds per square inch. At this level the water was as black as space itself. The beams from their searchlights had changed in color from yellow to a luminous gray bordered along each side with dark blue. Sprinkled through the blackness were the lights carried by many deep-sea fish. The two Alarians studied the vision screens with tense concentration. Fish swam through their light beams and were gone again in an instant in the surrounding blackness. Groups of lights moving through the darkness told them of large fish or schools of smaller fish, but they were unable to trace the outlines from the pattern of lights.

"We should be near bottom, by now, if this were 

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