“Right now, for example,” Gresham said in his soft voice, “I’m seeing this ship, from about half a mile away. I can see the smoke, and the little figures on deck. I can see myself, and you. From a distance. Once in a while a wave blocks my sight. You’re holding something white.”
Black stared off into the blue distance, where what had seemed a porpoise had broken water once and vanished. He could see nothing but ocean now.
“I told you I started imagining things on the raft,” Gresham went on. “I kept seeing things from different angles. I knew I was blind, but there were flashes … green vistas … blue sky and white clouds. …”
“Memory. Imagination.”
“It isn’t a porpoise,” Gresham said.
Black made an effort and pulled his mind into better coordination.
“Now listen,” he said. “All right. You were in the direct path of some new radiations. These figures—” He rustled the paper in his hand. “They don’t check exactly. There was an untyped form of radiation in this area after the atomic blast. But—” He went off at a tangent. “It isn’t a porpoise? What is it, then?”
“I don’t know. It’s intelligent. It’s trying to communicate with me.”
“Good Heavens!” Black said, genuinely startled now. The look he bent upon Gresham was dubious.
“I know, I know.” Gresham must have sensed in the silence that doubtful glance. “Maybe I’m making it all up. I did spot the—porpoise—but maybe my hearing’s improved. The rest—well, I haven’t got any proof except what I know I’ve seen—and felt. I tell you, it’s something intelligent out there. It’s trying to communicate and it can’t.” He rubbed his forehead above the bandages, his face taking on the old look of strain. “I can’t make sense out of it. Too—alien, I guess. But it’s trying hard. …” Suddenly he laughed. “I can imagine how you’re looking at me. Would you like to try some tests, Dr. Black? Knee-jerks, maybe?”
“Come on below with me,” Black said briefly. Gresham laughed again and got up. …
An hour later they were back on deck. Black looked worried.
“Listen, Gresham,” he said earnestly. “I don’t know what’s happened to you. I admit that. The encephalogram was—puzzling. Your brain emits radiations that don’t check with anything we’ve seen before. Some peculiar things are possible, theoretically. For instance, a radio isn’t really likely to pick up transmitted waves, but it does. And telepathy’s theoretically possible. Suppose your brain has been altered a little by your exposure to the atomic blast. There are powers latent in the human mind, new senses that we know little about.”
“I suppose you have to find new words for it,” Gresham said as Black stumbled and paused. “But I don’t care what the scientific diagnosis is. I can see again. Not with my own eyes. But I can see.”
He was silent for a moment, and to Black it seemed that the blind man’s whole face looked rapt, as if he gazed upon things more beautiful than a man with eyes ever saw. When Gresham spoke, his voice was rapt, too.
“I can see!” he repeated, almost to himself. “I don’t care what else happens. Something alive and intelligent and—and desperate is near me. I see through its eyes. Its thoughts are too different to 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.
So it swam down, down in the pearly light of dawn, with the sea and sky an enormous emptiness and the Albacore a small dark shape miles away, and Gresham’s body hidden within it, asleep, while his mind sank with the Swimmer through the fathomless seas.
Down and down, into the great deeps under the atolls, where abysses lie deeper than Everest is high. The Swimmer could plumb them, for the Swimmer was not human. Intelligent, yes, but—different. Life under
