understand. It’s trying to tell me something, and it can’t. I don’t care. All I care about is seeing, and the things I see.”

He hesitated.

“Beautiful,” he murmured. “All my life I’ve loved beautiful things. That’s why you found me out here, in the tropics, away from cities and ugliness. And now!” He laughed a little and his voice changed.

“If I could see your face, I wouldn’t be talking this way,” he said. “But I can’t, so I can say what I feel. Beauty is all that matters, and in a way I’m glad even this has happened, if it means I can go on seeing things like—like this.”

“Like what?” Black leaned forward tensely. “Tell me.”

Gresham shook his head. “I can’t. There aren’t any words.”

The two men sat silent for awhile, Black frowning and studying the rapt, blind face before him, Gresham staring through his bandages and through the eyes of another being, at things he could not speak of.

Something glistened among the waves, very far away, turned over in the water and sank again.

The next morning, Gresham did not awaken. To Black it resembled catalepsy. The man lay quietly, his heart faintly beating, his respiration almost stopped. Once or twice a ripple of motion crossed his features and he grimaced. But that was all. He lay for a long while, half-alive.

But he was double alive, triply—a hundredfold—elsewhere.

Around dawn it began to happen to him, he thought afterward. He felt first a something reaching out for him. His internal vision kept catching glimpses and then snapping shut again like a camera lens. There was a thought, beating against a barrier, trying to get through to him. But it was too alien. It could not reach through.

Gresham’s half-sleeping mind could not understand. He reached out into other minds around him, seeking contact. Bird minds—sparks of life rising and falling on the winds, dim, formless bits of cloud. And other small minds, in the waters, vague, weaving through green voids. But in the end he always came back to the Swimmer.

And in the end, the Swimmer must have realized it could not communicate, knew at last there was only one way left. It had to show him what it wanted to tell. And there was only one way to show him.

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