Gresham had never known this feeling of bodily freedom before. He shared with the Swimmer the physical sensation of motion in a supporting medium through which he could move freely in any direction. It was a strange, strong body that housed his mind temporarily, but no visual image of it formed.
There were sensations of indescribable difference—a smooth, flowing, muscular thrust that exploded into bursts of action as he drove downward. And an aching, straining discomfort gradually ceased as he sank. The race of the Swimmer was meant to live in the pressure of the deeps, and now the pressure began to fold in comfortingly. Once more the Swimmer’s body felt completely its own, and that deep, sensuous pleasure made it take an intricate path downward, as a bird plays in its own element or a dolphin gambols in the waves.
The dark began to close in. But Gresham began to be aware of a new, strange light from below, an unearthly dawn, in a light-band no human eyes could ever see except in this incredible manner. He could never describe the color of the abysmal dawn, a tremendous slow brightening of sunless day permeating the vastness of underseas.
Shadows of the deep water swam past, shapes of terror and mystery and fantastic beauty. Once the leviathan bulk of the great whale went by, and once a goblin picnic of tiny colored lanterns—fish with luminous spots driving in an insanely gay flight before the shadow of a barracuda that swept like death after them.
But the sea-bottom was dark. Perhaps only in some spots was this land of veiled shadows to be found. The immense glow of the submarine dawn drew itself in and focused on small areas as Gresham’s mind went downward with the Swimmer. And then a gargantuan black wall, without top or end or bottom, loomed before him.
Perspective swung round dizzily, and Gresham saw that it was no topless wall, but the bottom of the sea. Crags lifted from it. Atolls and hills jutted into the faint fringes of light, crawling with weeds, blanketed with undersea growth. But the great plain and the valleys were in shadow.
Anchored by glowing ropes that vanished in darkness below, swung latticed spheres of light. There were dozens of them, like shining toy balloons expanding in size as the Swimmer swept nearer and nearer. Across the lattices a troubled whirling ran, shaking vortices of darkness that made the spheres fade and brighten like lanterns, and then pulse into dimness again.
The Swimmer’s headlong sweep, like flight through green air, carried Gresham straight toward the nearest globe. Between the lattices an opening like a shutter widened, gaped, closed.
And this was a city of the underseas.
For five days Gresham’s body lay all but motionless in his bunk on the Albacore, while the ship drove forward over fathomless abysses where Gresham’s mind moved among mysteries. Dr. Black spent as much time as he could spare beside the cataleptic sleeper, watching the vague shadows of expression that moved now and again across his face—wonder, sometimes revulsion, sometimes strain and dread. But only the shadows of the real emotions which Gresham’s mind knew, far away.
On the fifth day he woke.
Black saw his hands rise quickly to the bandaged eyes, and Gresham sat up abruptly, making an inarticulate sound in his throat. His face for a moment was wild with dismay and horror.
“It’s all right,” Black said quietly. “It’s all right, Gresham. You’ve been asleep and dreaming, but you’re safe now. Wake up!”
“Safe!” Gresham said bitterly. “Blind again, you mean. And—” His face convulsed once in a grimace of revolt; then he had himself under control and his hands which had been clawing futilely at the bandage as if they could pull away blindness from his eyes, fell quietly to the blanket.
“What was it?” Black asked. “You were dreaming? Would you like to tell me?”
It did not come all at once. The story covered many days in fragmentary sessions, but in the end Gresham told.
“You’ll find a diagnosis to cover it,” he said to Black. “You’ll have to decide I’m a schizophrenic—is that the word—and I’m having hallucinations. It doesn’t matter to me. I know what happened. There were 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 notepad 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
