by Don Wilcox
“Don’t just stand there! Do something,” David said in a pained tone.
“As you will!” I plunged into the water. I called back, “You go back to Jim and wait there till you hear from me.” Then I struck off with swift strokes toward the dark streak across the red waters that marked the trail of the girl.
CHAPTER II
“I made him angry, didn’t I?” These surprising words came at me soon as I caught up with her. She must have loitered deliberately and it was my guess that she had hoped David was following her, though I could have been wrong.
“He’s not in a good humor today,” I said. “And you caught him off his guard.”
“He didn’t like what I said about a broken heart, did he?”
I was sure David hadn’t given that remark a thought, and I told her so. “He’s homesick for someone he left back home. His wife.”
“I thought so. Well, he knows nothing about broken hearts then. The only kind of pain he feels is the bite of the water hornet. That’s nothing.”
I swam to the other side of her so I could catch the advantage of the light in her face. What a curiosity, I thought. A golden-skinned girl living in this watery cave, swimming with the ease of a champion and looking like some fabulous beauty in a movie. You’d have thought there would be a swarm of men swimming after her—and here she was talking about broken hearts.
“You’ve recently lost a boy friend,” I said.
“How did you know? Who are you? Let me see your hands.”
I lifted a hand out of the water, and she stopped swimming long enough to examine it. She must have expected to find it webbed between the fingers, for she touched each finger separately.
“You must be a stranger,” she said. “I can see that you didn’t come in from the great ocean. You are a land dweller, aren’t you? But you swim well. I have a question to ask you.”
“I have a favor to ask you,” I said. “Here’s a resting place, where we can talk.”
The beads of her brief swimming costume clicked against the low rock as she clambered up onto its surface.
“This is a danger rock,” she said. “It’s so near the surface that you could swim into it and split your head before you see it.”
I was doing my best to see everything, and if I haven’t already said so, there was plenty to see. I meant to catch my bearings in this watery wilderness of rock towers and caverns, but I could hardly take my eyes off the girl. I felt pretty awkward as I sat beside her. What David had said worried me. I cleared my throat.
“My name is George. My friends and I came here to see the sights.”
“Um-m”
“They’re nice,” I said.
“My name is Loonza.”
“It’s a pretty name.”
“That’s not all of it.”
“What’s the rest?”
“Loonza-Lenza-Linza-Lee.”
“My gosh. That’s lots of name.”
“It came from the water. It’s the waves coming into a certain tiny little bay on the other side of the Black Ledge. That’s the song the water sings.” She recited it in a singsong voice. “Loonza . . . lenza . . . linza . . . lee . . . Pretty?”
“Sounds kinda looney to me.” I was far more fascinated than I cared to admit. “Do they ever tease you and call you Looney?”
“What’s looney?”
“Dippy. Goofy. Silly. It comes from luna—moon. I studied it in Latin. If you take a notion you want the moon, you’re looney, that’s for sure.”
“The moon? What’s the moon?”
I glanced around at the wide expanse of rock ceiling that must have extended over a square mile or more of water. There was no sky in this underground world—and the heavenly body I had in mind was a world away.
“We’ll skip the moon,” I said. “This natural radiation has all of the magic of moonlight, and more. Tell me, is it daytime or night-time, or do you know the difference down here?”
“Oh, of course. It’s night now. You can tell by the level of the water. When the tide begins to rise, and the water comes in on you, where you’re sleeping, and wakes you up—then it’s day.”
“What about all this glowing light?”
“If you want darkness you swim away from it. Don’t you know anything?”
“Where I come from, the sun goes down every night. Then if you want more light, you turn it on. If you want no light, you turn it off.”
Loonza-Lenza-Linza-Lee gave me an imploring look. She touched my hand and said, “Please don’t say such things.”
“Why not?”
“I like you, George, and I want to trust you. But I’ve heard such stories before and I never believe them. Light never changes.”
“Never?”
“Never. If this rock glows red today, the tide can come and go a thousand times. It will still glow the same red, no more, no less.”
There was such intensity in Loonza’s voice that I told myself I’d better steer clear of any argument. “What was the question you wanted to ask me?”
“How did you learn to talk my language?”
“I could ask you that one. It’s my language, you know. People on my part of the earth all speak it.”
She nodded happily. “Oh, then we’ve come from the same place. I mean my grandfathers a few generations back—they came from the earth. I’ve studied all about it in my classes.”
Classes? I thought of asking, just for a gag, whether the people swam in schools, like fish. But we were both sufficiently confused about each other, without adding complications.
“You were going to ask me a favor,” she said.
“Yes, and a very important one. Suppose I don’t want anyone—not anyone—to know that David and I and our friends are visiting here.”
“Why not?”
I could have answered that with a sarcastic reference to David’s suspicions. But I preferred not to cross him, even in my mind. After all, his father had been good enough to undertake this expedition. We had hoped, from the moment we hit Mercury, that we would be able to pick up the trail of my lost brother somewhere along the line. It was Uncle Willard’s idea that we’d better look in on this tribe from the outside before we burst in and started asking questions. My brother Kenneth might have walked into a pitfall with death at the bottom of it. That, indeed, is exactly what David feared we were doing.
“No why-nots at present,” I said. “Just make me the promise. Wherever you go and whomever you see, you’ll say not one word about any strangers being here. That’s the favor. Promise?”
She gave me a tantalizing smile, and I thought to myself, this battle is lost. She’ll swing right out to the biggest pool and tell everybody.
“I’m ready to promise,” she said. “Is there a special way to promise where you come from?”
Maybe I was the looney one; maybe it was red and blue waves that made me dizzy. Anyway I mumbled something about—well, I said we could seal the promise with a kiss.
“That’s a good way to seal an understanding—where I come from,” I added. “Of course, you don’t know what a kiss is—”
“Oh, don’t I?”
“So I’ll have to show you. First I put my arm around you like this—”
She moved out of my reach quickly. “You think I don’t know? How do you think I got that broken heart?” She rose, looking at me so fiercely that I felt a fool for trying to take such an advantage. I rose and stood awkwardly. She bent down to notice the level of the water.
“The night’s almost over. I’ll have to hurry home. My parents don’t know but what I’m sleeping . . . But I couldn’t sleep.”
“I hope—I hope I see you again. And I hope—I wish—”
“What?”
“That I could ask you to keep the promise—not to tell.”
She tossed her hair over her golden shoulders and gave me a smile that moonlight couldn’t have improved. She was a perfect statue, beautifully formed—and for a moment I forgot to breathe.
&
nbsp; “But the promise should be sealed, even if I do have a broken heart,” she said.
I started toward her. She kissed me, quickly, warmly, and then slipped out of my arms and dived into the water. She swam away so fast I’d never have overtaken her—even if I had tried. But I was still standing there, my arms extended, my fingers trembling.
CHAPTER III
The dark look that came up out of the water was David Pemberton. He must have swum across silently during the last of my scene with Loonza.
“I trust you followed my order, George,” he said with tight sarcasm in his voice that made me sure he had taken in the last of our visit. “Did you find it necessary to drown her—or only tie and gag her?”
“Oh, hello, David.” I tried to say it coldly. But these gentle tropical waters were getting a grip on me—or something. “How are you, David?” My voice was full of unnatural honey.
“I’m not very well.”
“No, don’t come up on this rock, David. This is a sacred rock. You shouldn’t touch it. There’s another—here, this way David. Here’s a nice cool rock. Now, what’s on your little mind? Have you noticed the gorgeous scenery? Gorgeous colors. Gorgeous—that’s the word.”
“I’m not interested in scenery.”
“No—no, our tastes are quite different. Sometimes I can hardly believe we’re cousins.”
“You’re talking like an idiot.”
“I’m looney—don’t mind me—that’s how it is.”
“George, snap out of it. Do you know that they have found a coat that belonged to your brother Ken?”
That sobered me. For an instant a paralysis caught me. I had spent countless hours in sorrow over the loss of my brother. After his communications ceased to come through, about two years ago, I had only one choice and that was to conclude that he had been lost.
“Where did they find it?”
“Come over to the shore and my father will tell you about it.” We swam through the red water. It was hard for me to break the sudden numbness that had seized my body. The recent visit with Loonza seemed a travesty upon the higher purpose of my coming here. I felt ashamed. David, observing my sudden change of mood, glowed with triumph.
“All right, now maybe you will attend to business.”
We clambered up on the dark rocks into a small cave which Uncle Willard had decided to make our headquarters. He was beside himself with excitement. He and two of the crewmen had captured a small boy—a lad of ten with frightened eyes and very curious hands and feet. The boy sat back in a dark corner of the cave waiting to see what would happen.
“Where did they get you?” I asked, going over to him. He was observing my hands just as I was observing his. He appeared to pity me because I lacked the neat webs between my fingers which would facilitate swimming in this watery world.
“What do you want with me?” the boy mumbled.
“Keep quiet, you,” my Uncle said. “We’ll get to you in a minute. Come here, George. I want to tell you what we saw. Do you remember that blue and yellow striped sports jacket that your brother used to wear? Well, we saw it. They’re using it over by the market. Using it for a net or something. They had it hooked up a few feet above the water. It looked like it was full of fish or something. But it’s the coat. I’d know it anywhere.”
I said I would like to see it at once. “Do you think it means that Ken—”
“It means he has been here. That’s all.”
David added to his father’s observation, “It means he’s been checked off. They never would have got that jacket away from him if he were still alive.”
“Just the same, I’d like to see it.”
They turned to the boy. They inquired about his webbed hands and feet and he told them that almost all of the people here were webbed. This seemed incomprehensible at first. My impression, from the stories of my grandfather, was that this colony had begun with a single spaceship load of passengers. If, as I had reason to believe, the entire tribe around this Crimson Sea were descendants of earth people, only three generations removed from their native land, there should be no reason for any radical changes in their physical structure.
Uncle Willard pursued this question. “Were you born that way?”
The boy shook his head. “They graft that onto us when we’re five years old. We can’t hope to be good swimmers unless we have good hands and feet.”
My uncle insisted that he was a champion swimmer himself. This caused the boy to laugh.
“You can’t swim, mister. You never would have caught me if I hadn’t been sound asleep.”
This did little to quiet my uncle’s noisy manner. He was feeling much too victorious over the success of this first incident. The boy was his, and he meant to press him for all the information he could get. How many people were there in this lost world? How did they live? What did they eat? How did they govern themselves? Who were the big-shots?
The boy’s version, while fragmentary, was satisfactory as a preliminary survey. We learned of the fourteen hundred people here, more than half were children. And these were the descendants, so the boy had learned from his history lessons, of only one hundred families who originally took refuge here.
“We never swim out into the ocean. Our parents won’t let us. But some of them go out to fish. No, I’ve never been hungry. There’s always a feast after Mong’s ships come back from the big ocean.”
“Where is the big ocean?”
“You have to swim under the Black Ledge before you see it. Once, when the tide was real low, I was there. But it was so bright out there that I was afraid.”
So it was apparent that the denizens of this great ocean cavern were content to remain here, seldom if ever viewing the outside world. Our questions about the passages up to the surface, through which we had descended, brought a similar answer. The children had never ventured far. And the adults who had been most adventurous, had been turned back, as a rule, by the brightness of the light.
I saw that David was growing impatient for a chance to tell Uncle Willard about my visit with Loonza.
“I’m going to swim out and take a look at that jacket,” I said abruptly. Uncle Willard was too busy with the boy to protest. I climbed down from the entrance of the cave and dived into the water.
Out in the wider reaches of the great cavern, it was now daytime. The tide had risen and with it the people of the Crimson Sea had wakened to the business of a new day. I proceeded cautiously, for I didn’t want any more surprise encounters.
From across the water I heard a low musical note—thoom . . . thoom . . . thoom . . .
Swimming closer, I observed that this was a part of the market. Some enterprising fellow was drumming up trade, and the customers were swimming in from several directions. Then I saw. Within the brighter yellow and orange light along the shoreline of the market, there hung an object which resembled an inverted umbrella. Its stripes of blue and yellow shown clearly. To these people it may have been a net full of fish. But to me it was Ken’s coat.
I made use of the shadows of rocks along the shore. No telling how far or how well these people could see in this strange light. I didn’t care to be discovered. But my curiosity drove me on.
Swish . . . swish . . . swish . . . The swimmers were all equipped, as the boy had been, with fin-like extensions of their fingers and toes. This was strange. I was certain that Loonza had not been treated to this particular improvement upon nature. And I wondered why she should be an exception.
Another ten strokes, then I ducked for the shadows again. A party of five or six persons were swimming in my direction, chattering excitedly. One of the women was fairly screeching. Such a thing had never happened before, she said.
“He’s my only boy. And he never runs away from home. Every morning he waits until I’ve had breakfast with him. I can’t understand it.”
The others of the party tried to comfort her. After all, a ten-year old boy was likely to chase out into the dark waters once in a while with
out his mother’s permission.
“No, I tell you, he has gotten into trouble. Maybe it was one of the sea monsters—”
“Stop talking that way. You’ll have the whole community in a panic.”
They were on their way to report to one of their officials, I gathered. And I knew that it concerned the loss of the boy that Uncle Willard had temporarily kidnapped.
As soon as they had passed, I struck out in the direction from which I had come. If Uncle Willard meant to avoid contact with these people as long as possible, he had better make up for this kidnapping somehow—and soon.
It was lucky that I turned back. When I climbed up to the edge of the cave I discovered that Uncle Willard and David were having a regular knock-down-dragout fight with the youngster. David dived for his feet and held him. Uncle Willard was looking for something to tie him with. And the boy was screeching and whipping the air with his fists. Those fists were no good at striking. He could claw, he could bat at the air, but he avoided injuring the delicately webbed fingers. It was an unfair fight and I stormed in with every intention of settling it fairly.
“Lay off that boy!” I snapped. I’m not too clear on what I did then. But my fists collided with David’s jaws two or three times—enough that he fell back looking sour and hurt. And Uncle Willard, gathering himself up for a tirade, held his peace long enough for me to get my word in.
“You’ve got no business handling the kid this way. Give him a chance. He’s done you the favor of answering your questions, hasn’t he?”
The boy saw his chance to slip past me and he went on the fly. He jumped from the cave entrance. Splash! He was away.
You should have seen the devil in Uncle Willard’s eye.
“That shouldn’t have happened,” he said with remarkable restraint. “We’ll have a hellova bill to pay for that slip. The whole ocean den will know we’re here.”
David spoke up then. “That’s the second slip. George pulled the first faux pas just before you returned.”
