anyhow. I’d done all I could, then. But this isn’t the end of it.”

“What do you mean?” Black demanded. Then he said quickly, “Never mind. You’ve got to rest now. You can think it over and tell me later.”

“I don’t need to think. Remember what I told you when I first saw the Others? How hateful they are even on first sight? Instinct, Black, sheer instinct tells you to kill them on sight. I—I don’t know why, but that’s what I’m going to do next.” He clenched his fist and struck the blanket lightly.

“Extermination!” he said in his hoarse, strained whisper. “Extermination!”

A week later the Albacore passed a group of tiny islets lying like scattered flowers on the water. Native outriggers came out, as usual, to offer fruit and gossip. Gresham seemed to know them. He talked briefly in Kanaka, and there was much nodding and liquid chatter among the natives. When the outriggers went back, Gresham went with them.

“I know what I want,” he told Black as the neurologist helped him over the rail. “I’m all right now, physically. Or as much as I’ll ever be. I’m a responsible man—you can stop worrying about me. I’ve even got enough money put aside for what small needs I’ll have from now on. Forget about me, doctor. And thanks—thanks very much.”

Doubtfully, and with a touch of strange, illogical envy, Black watched him go.

The globes that once swung glowing on their cables in the abyss swing dark now. Below them the night land of the sea-bottom stretches far away into a light that shines eternally, a light no human eyes will ever see. Inside the cities which are tombs now, the beautiful bodies of the dwellers float hollow-boned, bare skeletons cleansed by the wandering denizens of the sea. The dead race lies forever entombed in its dead cities.

But a race still lives among them for awhile. A dark, alien race that destroyed its masters and shambles now among the ruins it made. Death lives with that race.

Out of the immense ocean dawn above the ravening sharks come down silently, one by one, to kill and kill—and be killed. And on an island high over them, in the daylight he cannot see, a blind man sits on his beach with his strange sight focused in another world. A world of water and darkness and death.

He is not blind as other men are blind. He has a thousand eyes to see through. He had a vengeance to wreak. Some day that vengeance will 

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