cities down there....”

He had never known true beauty until he moved with the Swimmer through those incredible floating towns under the water. Our own race, chained by fetters of gravitation to the ground, never knew such wonders. Our bodies have been deformed, unsuccessful adaptations ever since we learned to walk upright. But a species without enslavement to gravity, developing in sheer beauty and sheer freedom, perfectly adapted to their green aquaeous world, had come into existence underseas.

“They can build as they like,” Gresham said softly. “Gravity doesn’t affect them, you see. There were houses—if you could call them houses—made in spirals and coils and spheres. They can float free within the globes if they like. Some of the houses move in orbits. Some of them—oh, I can’t tell you. I lived there with them for a long while, but I can’t describe them and I can’t tell you what the people were like. There aren’t words.

“He had to take me down to make me understand what he wanted. The Swimmer, I mean. But his city, like his mind, is too alien to tell about. I can only say it was beautiful, the kind of beauty I’ve loved all my life and tried to find for years. I’m going back down there, Black.”

“Why?” Black had a note-pad on his knee and his pen was moving smoothly across it as Gresham’s quiet voice went on. “Tell me about it, Gresham.”

“It was the atomic explosion,” the blind man said. “The radiations released some sort of balance, away down there, and their machines aren’t working as they should any more. That’s what caused those whirlpools of darkness in the light and made the lattices around the cities shake. And they need the lattices. They have an enemy down there—another race, or maybe a branch of their own race.

“It’s strange to think of wars going on down there just as they have here, and one race enslaving another, as the Swimmer’s people did. I thought at first they were—well, call it evil. I saw how they ruled. Evil is a foolish word. The Swimmer people are so beautiful and strong and wild, you can’t apply our rules to their lives. I lived among them. I saw that other race, in the dark of the sea-bottom, banished from that wonderful, strange light a human couldn’t even see.

“At first I thought it was cruelty that kept the—the others—enslaved. And then I happened to see one of the Others.” His voice faltered and a shadow of revulsion crossed the bandaged face. “I saw what was left after a minor uprising, and I saw 

 Prev. P 9/15 next