.

.

.

Under the Ice

.

Pearl was thinking of Them, for doubtless those were Them, those creatures they had tried to give him to. They were quite unlike the horrors his imagination had conjured up, and for that reason had taken him off his guard. They appealed away from the fantasies to an earlier, almost infantile, complex of fears. Giants, ogres, ghosts, skeletons: those were its keywords. Spooks on stilts, he said to himself; surrealistic bogy-men with their long faces. At the same time, the disabling panic of the first moments was ebbing away from him. The idea of suicide was now far from his mind; instead, he was determined to back his luck to the end. He prayed, and he felt his knife. He felt a strange emotion of confidence and affection towards himself. He checked himself on the point of saying, "We'll stick to one another."

The ground became worse and interrupted his meditation. He had been going gently upwards for some hours with steeper ground on his right, apparently half scaling, half skirting a hill. His path now began to cross a number of ridges, spurs doubtless of the higher ground on the right. He did not know why he should cross them, but for some reason he did; possibly a vague memory of earthly geography suggested that the lower ground would open out to bare places between geysers and rock where They would be more likely to catch him. As he continued crossing ridges and gullies he was struck with their extreme steepness that he had not accounted for in his images of Europa, but somehow they were not very difficult to cross with the fatigue of leaping nearly leaving him. He noticed, too, that even the smallest hummocks of dust were of an unearthly shape, too narrow, too pointed at the top and too small at the base: he remembered that the tops of the geysers had displayed a similar oddity. Was Jupiter's subtle gravity affecting the direction of Europan geographical molding?

And Them, likewise (he shuddered as he thought it) they too were madly elongated. He had sufficient science and experience to guess that he must be on a world lighter than the Earth, where less strength was needed and nature was set free to follow her skyward impulse on a superterrestrial scale. Ironically enough, this gave him more sense of bleak desolation than the actual landscape ever could. The geysers had simulated a part in his mind that interpreted tall, slender rods, whatever their color and composition, as trees, and a gathering of them as a forest.

He became aware of a subtle hissing vibration in the ground. He figured that the ice under his feet was moving according to some subterranean flow and shift. The reminder of his dwindling oxygen came in that his breathing was becoming more and more labored. He had already decided that running out of air would not be a bad death. He would lie and look at Jupiter as a dreamless sleep fell over him, reaching up to the heavens in triumph. He had escaped his captors and Them. He would never fall into their hands, or tentacles, or palps. It was certainly better than death by stabbing. He would not open his spacesuit; there were horrific tales of men in an airless environment who inflated like a balloon as their blood oxygenated, agonizingly, before exploding into a red mash. He lay down and yawned at his fatigue.

The sound of his own voice yawning, the old sound heard in night nurseries, school dormitories and in so many bedrooms, liberated a flood of self-pity. He drew his knees up and hugged himself; he felt a sort of physical, almost a filial, love for his own body. He put spacesuit's electronic watch to his eye and found that it had stopped. He tapped it. Muttering, half whimpering to himself; he thought of men going to bed on the far-distant planet Earth, men in clubs, and liners, and hotels, married men, and small children who slept with mother in the room, and warm, tobacco-smelling men tumbled together in military bases. The tendency to talk to himself was irresistible. "We'll look after you, Pearl...we'll stick together, old man." Was that Diamond or Platinum or Bronze speaking? It could have been any of the Pokedex Holders.

He was quite aware of the danger of madness, and applied himself vigorously to his devotions and his toilet. Not that madness mattered much. Perhaps he was mad already, and not really on Europa but safe in bed in a Sinnohian asylum. If only it might be so! He would ask Bronze, who was standing before him..curse it! There his mind went playing the same trick again. He rose and began walking briskly away.

These delusions of companionship occurred every few minutes at this stage of his journey. He developed the process of standing still mentally, letting the vivid hallucinations pass over him. Eventually he came to understand that nothing was more horrifying than the thought that the two inches of space from the interior of his spacesuit to the exterior were all keeping him firmly alive. He would die if he took it off and die if he left it on. Nothing else could compare with the sudden and overwhelming cosmic horror, not Them, not revolver bullets, not the tyranny of distance.

It was impossible to continue the past hour's flight as a flight; inevitably it degenerated into an endless ramble, vaguely motivated by the search for shelter. The search was necessarily vague, since he did not know whether Europa held air for him nor how to recognize it if it did. He had one bad fright in the course of the trek, when, passing through a somewhat more open ice glade, he became aware first of a huge, yellowish object, like swiss cheese, then of two, and then of an indefinite multitude coming towards him. Before he could fly he found himself in the midst of a herd of enormous pale creatures more like Pokemon than anything else he could think of; they were actually Lunatone. This cosmic variety, Pearl noted, was slenderer, and very much higher, than their earth-bound cousins. They saw him and stared at him with their big red eyes, crying in psychic profundity, but had apparently no hostile intentions. They bumped into him a little, curious, and then passed on.

This episode had an infinitely comforting effect on Pearl. The planet was not, as he had begun to fear, lifeless except for Them. Here was a very presentable sort of Pokemon, a Pokemon which man could probably tame, if he had the Poke Balls at hand. The collection of extraterrestrial creatures, though admittedly of a kind that was known to frequent at least as far away as the Moon, were so earthly that Pearl felt a new confidence that he would find some food or water or oxygen as it appeared on Earth.

But next moment his heart stood still. Against the pallid background of the geysers to his right and quite close to him, perhaps a quarter mile away, an elongated shape moved toward him. He recognized it instantly as it moved slowly (and, he thought, stealthily) between two of the geyser tops: the giant stature, the cadaverous leanness, the long, drooping, wizard-like profile of Them. The head appeared to be narrow and conical and grey-colored; the hands or paws with which it parted the water before it as it moved were thin, mobile, spidery, ringed with black against grey, and almost transparent. He felt an immediate certainty that it was looking for him. All this he took in in an infinitesimal time. The ineffaceable image was hardly stamped on his brain before he was running as hard as he could in the opposite direction of It.

He had no plan save to put as many miles as he could between himself and the alien. He prayed fervently that there might be only one; perhaps this part of the planet was full of them, and perhaps they had the intelligence to make a circle around him. No matter. There was nothing for it now but sheer running, running, knife in hand. The fear had all gone into action; emotionally he was cool and alert, and ready, as ready as he ever would be, for the last trial. His flight led him downhill at an ever-increasing speed; soon the incline was so steep that if his body had had terrestrial gravity he would have been compelled to take to his hands and knees and clamber down. Then he saw something gleaming ahead of him.

It was unmistakably a bright ravine, its visible interior sides intermingled with the whole gamut of blue shades of ice and flinging strange lights far up to his visor. There were ravines on Europa. The alien was behind him and gaining. Its height made it far better adapted to the environment, a world with less weight. Pearl, nearly as unconsciously as was possible, ran over without looking back. Pearl then jumped in. He did this head-first like an animal, completing the operation by flinging his legs together into the air and then whisking them neatly into a streamlined position with an agility that would have been quite impossible to a man of his size on Earth.

...

A bright light emitting from a headlamp on the brow of his spacesuit at once illuminated the dark and gloomy depths. The effect was stupendous. He was floating (falling) down to a small terrace formed by a fragment of rock projecting some distance from the sides of the shaft. With a sigh he discovered that the bottom was wholly invisible. I have very strong doubts if the most determined geologist would, during that descent, have studied the nature of the different layers of earth around him. Pearl did not trouble his head much about the matter; whether he was among the ice, dust, or primitive soil, he neither knew nor cared to know.

He soon found himself standing on that extraordinary ledge. After leaning against the ravine wall he brought upon him a slow-moving and disagreeable rain or hail of small stones, ice and dust. Over the edge he noticed that the upper edges of the pit were actually getting closer and closer together. Pearl understood that he could not climb out. There was a scuffling overhead, and he heard the cry of It inside his head. Now he jumped off and skidded down the angeled slope to the regions of eternal night.

Soon he hit the bottom. Amid the ice and rocks that had accumulated there for ages, he dimly saw a tunnel that turned obliquely to the right and below. All the walls around him were ice. It was not even now quite dark, the light flickering up and down in a frantic matter. A thousand prisms of reflected light collected the luminance and sent it back around like a shower of sparks. Pearl was able to see objects around him with ease.

With no other option he went down the tunnel. It soon resolved into a series of terrifying drops that he was only able to descend into most delicately. If he was going to soon die underground was a sorry thing that he would not be able to see the stars. But the thrill of seeing an underground ocean, such that Europa was purported to have miles into the ground, was a thrill all by itself. Rhodes had once said that the ocean was about sixty miles through the frozen crust. The presence of the geysers suggested a much shallower location, at least at the undoubtedly polar regions that they had landed near.

Happily some cracks, abrasures of the soil, and other irregularities, served as the place of steps that he would jump down toward, some a full hundred feet away. The meter on his suit said that he was a full mile below the surface of the planet. There was an aching for water in his mouth and a cramp in his side. But that which served as steps under his feet became in other places stalactites. The raised ice, very porous in certain places, took the form of little round blisters. Crystals of opaque quartz, adorned with limpid drops of natural glass suspended to the roof like lusters, seemed to take fire as he passed beneath them. This mighty natural cavern was about a hundred feet wide, and at least several miles high. Pearl could think of no geological reason for its being there. The earth had evidently been cast apart by some violent subterranean commotion, but on a planet without tectonic plates or observable volcanic activity this was beyond unlikely. The mass, giving way to some prodigious upheaving of nature, eventually split in two.

All of this lasted a few hours of mostly perpetual descent. After he was four miles down the constant lowering into the ice stopped. At first he saw absolutely nothing when facing out at the grotto. His eyes, wholly unused to the effulgence of light, could not bear the sudden brightness; and he was compelled to close them. When he was able to reopen them, he stood still, far more stupefied than astonished. Not all the wildest effects of imagination could have conjured up such a scene.

"God!" he cried. "The sea!"

...

It was quite true. A vast, limitless expanse of water, the end of a lake if not of an ocean, spread before him, until it was lost in the distance. The shore, which was very much indented, consisted of a dark rock. The waves broke incessantly, though without any sonorous manner to be found in underground localities. A slight frothy flake arose as Jupiter's gravity blew waves along the pellucid waters, and many a dash of spray was blown into Pearl's face. The mighty superstructure of rock which rose above to an inconceivable height left only a narrow opening. Where he stood there was a large margin of strand. On all sides were capes and promontories and enormous cliffs, partially worn by the eternal breaking of the waves. As he gazed from side to side the mighty rocks faded away like a fleecy film of cloud. It was in reality an ocean, with the usual characteristics of an inland sea, only horribly wild, so rigid, cold and savage.

Then one thing puzzled him greatly. How was it that he could look out over the sea without looking into shifting darkness? The vast landscape before him was lit up not wholly like day, but with a greenish tinge that reflected on the sloping concave of ice overhead, and danced around the pillars of frost that stretched between the roof and the underwater floor of the sea. But there was wanting the dazzling brilliancy, the splendid irradiation of the sun; the pale cold illumination of the moon; the brightness of the stars. The illuminating power in this subterranean region, from its trembling and flickering character, its strange angelic wavering, the very slight elevation of its temperature, and its great superiority to that of the moon, was evidently electric; something in the nature of the aurora borealis, only that its phenomena was more constant, and able to light up the whole of the ocean cavern.

The tremendous vault above his head, which he called the sky, appeared to be composed of a conglomeration of nebulous vapors, in constant motion. Pearl should originally have supposed that, under such an airless environ as must exist in that place, the evaporation of water could not really take place, and yet from the action of some physical law, which escaped his memory, there were heavy and dense clouds rolling along that mighty vault, partially concealing the roof. Electric currents produced astonishing play of light and shade in the distance, especially around the heavier clouds. Deep shadows were cast beneath, and then suddenly, between two clouds, there would come a ray of unusual beauty, and remarkable intensity. And yet it was not like the sun, for it gave no heat on the spacesuit's skin.

In truth, Pearl was imprisoned, bound as it were, in a vast excavation. Its width it was impossible to make out; the shore, on either hand, widened rapidly until lost to sight; while its length was equally uncertain. A haze on the distant horizon bounded his view. As to its height, he saw that it was at least half a mile to the roof. I use the word "cavern" in order to give an idea of the place. I cannot describe its awful grandeur; human language fails to convey an idea of its savage sublimity. Whether this singular vacuum had or had not been caused by the sudden cooling of the planet when in a state of fusion with Jupiter's tidal forces, I can not say.

The presence of clouds most alarmed Pearl. In a planet without an atmosphere such things should have been impossible. It tricked into his mind over the next hour that the space in the cave might be breathable, or at least, not airless. The suit did not have a function to determine the presence of oxygen. A few test runs determined that he was too heavy in the suit to navigate in the water. Awkwardly he looked under and found the presence of rocks in piles amid shallow pools before the abyss, painted, as they were, in neon green growths. The exact function of the brightness could not have been explained by the glowing stones alone, for the very hadal depths were shining as if they had been dipped in the light of deep heaven. Since further exploration was denied to him he decided that he would remove his helmet after his air ran out. He sat by the vast reservoir and looked out over the glowing sea.

Of course, he understood, that even in the unlikely and unnaturally fortuitous presence of air, survival was unlikely. The magnetic fields of Earth and the thick airs that safeguarded its green skin also protected it from the solar winds that issued from the living heart of the Sun and were blown over the fields of the Solar System for light-months around. Even in the ship he had been conscious of energies and rays that normally were filtered out by the atmosphere causing his limbs to creak and mind to dream. As soon as he removed the helmet the radiation would piece his body dagger-like, the molecules in his flesh were split apart like so many little firecrackers, his white skin would be burned burn, and it would be one final bleeding, horrible death.

If the rocks above him did protect from the solar energies then his dominant concern would eventually become food. Water was abundant. If there was oxygen in the cave, he thought, then organic life was likely, other organic life besides Them. That life might be eaten. But if not, then he would either starve to death or return to the white and bleached surface to die under the light of Jupiter. Only the second was appetizing, because he had already intended for it.

He noticed a white something on the shore. Upon examination it was revealed to be an ichthyoid skeleton, similar to a sturgeon or Goldeen. He could not really tell the difference. Then there came a sudden and very hard splash. The water took its time in resting on his spacesuit boots. Coolly he squatted, and saw moving in the small breakers at the shore, a living fish.

After Pearl seized it the fish tried very violently to escape. It had a flat head, round body, and the lower extremities covered with bony scales; its mouth was wholly without teeth, and the pectoral fins, which were highly developed and lengthy, sprouted directly from the body, which properly speaking had no tail. It was blind, not only having no eyes, but no organs relating for sight at all. The animal certainly belonged to the order in which naturalists class the sturgeon or cavern fish, but it differed from that fish in many essential particulars. It was not dying immediately from either rays or gases and Pearl hastily threw it back into the sea.

There might be air, or there might be not. But now he was certain there was no ambient radiation. All either courses of waiting in the face of certain mystery were intolerable, and with a final prayer he removed his helmet and did not breathe. The air was cold, like an early spring day, but moist, and his eyes did not sting. For the final test he exhaled and then attempted to draw in a deep breath.

The shock of the extreme coldness and bitterness of the air in his lungs shook him. He regressed into a coughing fit so severe that for a time he forgot the higher and more immediate delight that the air in the cave was somehow breathable. Once he got used to the air he found that it had very minty taste, fresh and cool, totally alien to him after the hot air he had breathed in the fierce temperatures of Heaven. With a hearty laugh he proceeded to the next test. He found the water was apparently hotter than that of eighty degrees, perhaps nearer a subterranean source of heat. What he really wanted to know was whether he dared drink it. He was very thirsty by now; but it looked very poisonous, very unwatery. He would try not to drink it; perhaps he was so tired that thirst would let him sleep. He sank on his knees and bathed his hands in the warm shores.

After the nap he found that thirst had woke him. Better now or never, he supposed. He lay down on the bank and plunged his face in the warm flowing liquid. It was good to drink. It had a strong mineral flavor, and was not salty, but it was very good. He drank again and found himself greatly refreshed and steadied. He then fully plunged his flushed face into the green translucence. "I am drinking the waters of the Airish regions," he cried after raising his head again, and blessedly felt a faint and quiet vibration in the air and rocks around him. It was the sound of his own voice, diminished by the quality of the air he was breathing, but painfully familiar.

After finding that the water was drinkable he shed the rest of his spacesuit, standing only in the heavy clothes he had worn before the ship's landing. The great mysteries now were how to find reliable food, and what exactly he was breathing into his lungs. It did not convey sound as effectively as earthly air but had all the similar qualities of sustaining biological life. He was dimly aware of the whining tones of the relatively calm sea and the rumored boomings of the thunder. There was not a natural airlock between this deep cave and the surface, so how came the air? And the existence of oxygen supposed vast amounts of organic life in the sea. Pearl deduced that this was an upper lake or pocket of the vast, unknown, true undersea, and could not have stretched for more than a few dozen miles, not large enough to create an independent ecosystem.

The culmination of all the anomalies on the trip came crashing down on him. He slunk down with one hand in the sea and the other across his brow. The inexplicable celestial heat, the unorthodox artificial gravity, the sensations he had experienced when entering the Jovian gravitational field, the liftoff from Earth so silent as not to have wakened him and a landing so smooth as not to have jarred him, the presence of alien life, the pocket of gases breathable to Men, the light in the sea, the drinkability of the water, and the blind cave fish were things he could not reconcile with all earthly science. Was it possible that he had been brought to another universe?

But how! It was a stupid thought that did nothing to help him. For food he might be able to catch more fish, eating them raw if necessary. If they were poisonous or undigestable, then starvation be damned; there was always the option of ascent to the surface and then suicide. All of his elemental needs were more or less taken care of. The next course was to be an expedition around the shore and possibly short trips out into the water. He felt protected from Them at any rate.

...

He lay still to listen and to adjust his breath. His eyes were upon green water. It was agitated. Circles shuddered and bubbles danced ten yards away from his face. Suddenly the water heaved and a round, shining, slipperly thing like a cannonball came into sight. Then he saw eyes and mouth, a puffing mouth bearded with bubbles. More of the thing came up out of the water. It was gleaming green. Finally it splashed and wallowed to the shore and rose, steaming, on its hind legs, six or seven feet high and too thin for its height, like everything in Europa. It had a hide of overlapping green scales, lucid as sealskin, very short legs with webbed feet, a very sloped back of the head, strong fore-limbs with webbed claws or fingers, and some complication halfway up the belly which Pearl took to be its genitals. It was something like a lizard, something like an otter, something like a snake; the slenderness and flexibility of the body suggested a giant, upright reptile. The great reptiloid head, heavily sloped, was mainly responsible for the suggestion of snake, but it was higher in the forehead than a snake's and the mouth was smaller.

There comes a point at which the actions of fear and precaution are purely conventional, no longer felt as terror or hope by the fugitive. Pearl lay perfectly still, pressing his body as well down into the water as he could, in obedience to a wholly theoretical idea that he might thus pass unobserved. He felt little emotion. He noted in a dry, objective way that this was apparently to be the end of his story, caught between one of Them from the land above and a big, green lizard from the water below. He had, it is true, a vague notion that the jaws and mouth of the beast were not those of a carnivore; but he knew that he was too ignorant of zoology to do more than guess. The only Pokemon he had seen so far on Europa were Lunatone and this new arrival was nothing like a Pokemon at all.

Then something happened that completely altered his state of mind. The creature, which was still steaming and shaking itself on the bank and had obviously not seen him, opened its mouth and began to make noises. This in itself was not remarkable; but a lifetime of study in the arts of speaking and comedy assured Pearl almost at once that these were articulate noises. The creature was talking. It had language. If you are not yourself a philologist or expert in speaking, I am afraid you must take on trust the prodigious emotional consequences of this realization in Pearl's mind. A new world he had already seen, but a new, extra-terrestrial, non-human language was a different matter.

Somehow he had not thought of this in connection with Them; now, it flashed upon him like a revelation. The love of knowledge is a kind of madness. In the fraction of a second which it took Pearl to decide that the creature was really talking, and while he still knew that he might be facing instant death, his imagination had leaped over every fear and hope and probability of his situation to follow the dazzling project of making a Europan grammar. An Introduction to the Jovian Language, The Europan Verb, A Concise Extrasolar-Kantoian Dictionary...the titles flitted through his mind. And what might one not discover from the speech of a non-human race? The very form of language itself, the principle behind all possible languages, might fall into his hands. Unconsciously he raised himself on his elbow and stared at the black beast. It became silent. The reptilian head swung round and lustrous amber eyes fixed him. There was no wind on the lake or in the shore. Minute after minute in utter silence the representatives of two so far-divided species stared each into the other's face.

Pearl rose to his knees. The creature leaped back, watching him intently, and they became motionless again. Then it came a pace nearer, and Pearl jumped up and retreated, but not far; curiosity held him. He summoned up his courage and advanced holding out his hand; the beast misunderstood the gesture. It backed into the shallows of the lake and he could see the muscles tightened under its sleek scales, ready for sudden movement. But there it stopped; it, too, was in the grip of curiosity. Neither dared let the other approach, yet each repeatedly felt the impulse to do so himself, and yielded to it. It was foolish, frightening, ecstatic and unbearable all in one moment. It was more than curiosity. It was like a courtship, like the meeting of the first man and the first woman in the world; it was like something beyond that; so natural is the contact of sexes, so limited the strangeness, so shallow the reticence, so mild the repugnance to be overcome, compared with the first tingling intercourse of two different, but rational, species.

The creature suddenly turned and began walking away. A disappointment like despair smote Pearl. "Come back," he shouted in Kantoian. The thing turned, spread out its arms and spoke again in its unintelligible language; then it resumed its progress. It had not gone more than twenty yards away when Pearlsaw it stoop down and pick something up. It returned. In its hand (he was already thinking of its webbed forehand as a full hand) it was carrying what appeared to be a shell, the shell of some oyster-like creature, but rounder and more deeply domed. It dipped the shell in the lake and raised it full of water. Then it held the shell to its own middle and seemed to be pouring something into the water.

Pearl thought with disgust that it was urinating in the shell. Then he realized that the protuberances on the creature's belly were not genital organs nor organs at all; it was wearing a kind of girdle hung with various pouch-like objects, and it was adding a few drops of liquid from one of these to the water in the shell. This done it raised the shell to its white lips and drank, not throwing back its head like a man but bowing it and sucking like a horse. When it had finished it refilled the shell and once again added a few drops from the receptacle, which seemed to be some kind of skin bottle, at its waist. Supporting the shell in its two arms, it extended them towards Pearl. The intention was unmistakable. Hesitantly, almost shyly, he advanced and took the cup. His fingertips touched the webbed membrane of the creature's hand and an indescribable thrill of mingled attraction and repulsion ran through him; then he drank. Whatever had been added to the water was plainly alcoholic; he had never enjoyed a drink so much.

"Thank you," he said in Kantoian, "thank you very much."

The creature struck itself on the chest and made a noise. Pearl did not at first realize what it meant. Then he saw that it was trying to teach him its name, presumably the name of the species.

"Haada," it said, "haada," and flapped itself.

"Haada," Pearl said, and then pointed at it; then he said "Man," and pointed at his own chest.

"Hman," imitated the haada. It picked up a handful of stones, where stones appeared between rock and water at the bank of the ocean.

"Hrupo," it said. Pearl repeated the word. Then an idea occurred to him.

"Handrama?" he asked in an inquiring voice.

The haada rolled its eyes and waved its arms, obviously in an effort to indicate the whole landscape. Pearl was getting on well. Hrupo was earth the element; Handrama, the "earth" or planet as a whole. Soon he would find out what it deeply meant. The haada was now trying to teach him the meaning of hroum. He recognized the root sound "hr" but this time he could make nothing of the haada's gestures, and remained ignorant of what a hroum might be. He took the initiative by opening his mouth, pointing to it and going through the pantomime of eating. The Europan word for food or eat which he got in return proved to contain consonants unreproducible by a human mouth, and Pearl, continuing the pantomime, tried to explain that his interest was practical as well as philological. The haada understood him, though he took some time to understand from its gestures that it was inviting him to follow it. In the end, he did so.

It took him only as far as where it had got the shell, and here, to his not very reasonable astonishment, Pearl found that a kind of boat was moored under some breakers that overhung the ocean and blocked his sight. Man-like, when he saw the artifact he felt more certain of the haada's rationality. He even valued the creature the more because the boat, allowing for the usual Europan height and flimsiness, was really very like an earthly boat; only later did he set himself the question, "What else could a boat be like?" The haada produced an oval platter of some tough but slightly flexible material, covered it with strips of a spongy, green-coloured substance and gave it to Pearl. He cut a convenient length off with his knife and began to eat; doubtfully at first and then ravenously. It had a beanlike taste but sweeter; good enough for a starving man. Then, as his hunger ebbed, the sense of his situation returned with dismaying force. The huge, lizard-like creature seated beside him became unbearably ominous. It seemed friendly; but it was very big, very green, and he knew nothing at all about it. What were its relations to Them? And was it really as rational as it appeared?

It was only many days later that Pearl discovered how to deal with these sudden losses of confidence. They arose when the rationality of the haada tempted you to think of it as a man. Then it became abominable, a man seven feet high, with a snaky body, covered, face and all, with thick green animal scales, and fanged like a serpent. But starting from the other end you had an animal with everything an animal ought to have, a glossy skin, liquid eye, sweet breath and whitest teeth, and added to all these, as though Paradise had never been lost and earliest dreams were true, the charm of speech and reason. Nothing could be more disgusting than the one impression; nothing more delightful than the other. It all depended on the point of view.

...

When Pearl had finished his meal and drunk again of the strong waters of Europa, bewildered at his sudden change in fortune and the anomalies that accompanied it, his host rose and entered the boat. Having got into the boat, he proceeded to get out again and then pointed to it. Pearl understood that he was being invited to follow his example. The question which he wanted to ask above all others could not, of course, be put. Were the haadae (he discovered later that this was the plural of haada) the dominant species on Europa, and Them, despite Their more man-like shape, merely a semi-intelligent kind of cattle? Fervently he hoped that it might be so. On the other hand, the haada might be the domestic animals of Them, in which case the latter would be superintelligent. His whole imaginative training somehow encouraged him to associate superhuman intelligence with monstrosity of form and ruthlessness of will. To step on board the haada's boat might mean surrendering himself to Them at the other end of the journey. On the other hand, the haada's invitation might be a golden opportunity of leaving the enemy-haunted lands behind him forever. And by this time the haada itself was becoming puzzled at his apparent inability to understand it. The urgency of its signs finally determined him. The thought of parting from the haada could not be seriously entertained; its animality shocked him in a dozen ways, but his longing to learn its language, and, deeper still, the shy, ineluctable fascination of unlike for unlike, the sense that the key to prodigious adventure was being put in his hands; all this had really attached him to it by bonds stronger than he knew. He gathered and folded up the discarded spacesuit before stepping into the boat.

The boat was without seats. It had a very high prow, an enormous expanse of free-board, and what seemed to Pearl an impossibly shallow draught. Indeed, very little of it even rested on the water; he was reminded of a modern speedboat. It was moored by something that looked at first like rope; but the haada cast off not by untying but by simply pulling the apparent rope in two as one might pull in two a piece of soft licorice or a roll of plasticine. It then squatted down on its rump in the stern sheets and took up a paddle, a paddle of such an enormous blade that Pearl wondered how the creature could wield it, till he again remembered how light a planet they were on. The length of the haada's body enabled him to work freely in the squatting position despite the high gunwale. It paddled quickly.

They passed out into the open ocean. The haada, now taking great care and often changing direction and looking about it, paddled well out from the shore. The dazzling green expanse grew moment by moment wider around them; Perl could not look steadily at it. The warmth from the water was oppressive; he removed his cap and jerkin, and by so doing surprised the haada very much.

He rose cautiously to a standing position and surveyed the Europan prospect which had opened on every side. Before and behind them lay the glittering lake, here studded with icy islands. At the shoreline the lake vanished into more complicated groupings of land and water, softly embossed in the huge breakers. But this land or chain of archipelagoes, as he now beheld it, was bordered on each side with jagged walls of the pale green ice, which he could still hardly call walls, so tall they were, so gaunt, sharp, narrow and seemingly unbalanced. On the starboard they were not more than a mile away and seemed divided from the water only by a narrow strip of land; to the left they were far more distant, though still impressive; perhaps seven miles from the boat. They ran on each side of the watered country as far as he could see, both onwards and behind them; he was sailing, in fact, on the flooded floor of a majestic enclosed canyon nearly ten miles wide and of unknown length. Only straight ahead and straight astern was the planet cut with the vast gorge, which now appeared to him only as a rut or crack in the tableland.

He wondered what the length of the cavern was and endeavored to ask by signs. The question was, however, too particular for sign-language. The haada, with a wealth of gesticulation (its arms or fore-limbs were more flexible than his and in quick motion almost whip-like) made it clear that it supposed him to be asking about the the cave in general. It named this dharmendra. The watered country further into the planet's surface was the harmendra. Pearl grasped the implications, dharmendra, heights, harmendra, lowness. Highland and lowland, in fact. The peculiar importance of the distinction in underground Europan geography he learned later.

By this time the haada had attained the end of its careful navigation. They were a couple of miles from land when it suddenly ceased paddling and sat tense with its paddle poised in the air; at the same moment the boat quivered and shot forward as if from a catapult. They had apparently availed themselves of some current. In a few seconds they were racing forward at some fifteen miles an hour and rising and falling on the strange, sharp, perpendicular waves of Europa with a jerky motion quite unlike that of the choppiest sea that Pearl had ever met on Earth. It reminded him of disastrous experiences on Platinum's trotting Rapidash on his travels, and it was intensely disagreeable. He gripped the gunwale with his left hand and mopped his brow with his right the damp warmth from the water had become very troublesome. He wondered if the Europan food, and still more the Europan drink, were really digestible by a human stomach. Thank heaven he was a good sailor!

Or, at least, a fairly good sailor. At least. Hastily he leaned over the side. Heat from green water smote up to his face; in the depth he thought he saw eels playing: long, silver eels. The worst happened not once but many times. In his misery he remembered vividly the shame of being sick at a children's party...long ago in the star where he was born. He felt a similar shame now. It was not thus that the first representative of humanity would choose to appear before a new species. Did haadae vomit too? Would it know what he was doing? Shaking and groaning, he turned back into the boat. The creature was keeping an eye on him, but its face seemed to him expressionless; it was only long after that he learned to read the Europan face.

The current meanwhile seemed to be gathering speed. In a huge curve they swung across the lake to within a furlong of the farther shore, then back again, and once more onward, in giddy spirals and figures of eight, while black rock and jagged ice raced backwards and Pearl loathingly associated their sinuous course with the nauseous curling of the silver eels. He was rapidly losing all interest in Europa: the distinction between Earth and other planets seemed of no importance compared with the awful distinction of earth and water. He wondered despairingly whether the haada habitually lived on water. Perhaps they were going to spend the night in this detestable boat.

His sufferings did not, in fact, last long. There came a blessed cessation of the choppy movement and a slackening of speed, and he saw that the haada was backing water rapidly. They were still afloat, with shores close on each side; between them a narrow channel in which the water hissed furiously, apparently a shallow. The haada jumped overboard, splashing an abundance of warm water into the ship; Pearl, more cautiously and shakily, clambered after it. He was about up to his knees. To his astonishment, the haada, without any appearance of effort, lifted the boat bodily on to the top of its head, steaded it with one webbed hand, and proceeded, erect as a Hisuian statue, to the new land. They walked forward, if the swinging movements of the haada's short legs from its flexible hips could be called walking, beside the channel. In a few minutes Pearl saw a new landscape.

The ocean was not only an upper shallow but a rapid, the first, indeed, of a series of rapids by which the water descended steeply for the next half mile. The see began to actually dip lower and lower. Its ice walls, however, did not sink with it, and from his present position Pearl got a clearer notion of the lay of the land. Far more of the underground highlands to left and right were visible, sometimes covered with cloudlike blue swellings of frost, but more often level, pale and barren to where the smooth line of their horizon matched with the cave walls. This cave was less like a pure ocean than he had been beginning to suppose. Indeed, there seemed to belong in it island chains. To the sea itself there seemed no end; uninterrupted and very nearly straight, it ran behind him, a narrowing line of green color, to where it clove the horizon with a narrowing indenture. There must be a hundred miles of it in view, he thought; and he reckoned that he had put some thirty or forty miles of it behind him since yesterday.

All this time they were descending beside the rapids to where the water was level again and the haada could relaunch its skiff. During this walk Pearl learned the words for boat, rapid, water, fish, and carry; the latter, as his first verb, interested him particularly. The haada was also at some pains to impress upon him an association or relation which it tried to convey by repeating the contrasted pairs of words haada-harrappan and Lur-harrappa. Pearl understood him to mean that the hadda came from the harrappan and Lur also was from the harrapa What the deuce was Lur, he wondered. Perhaps the haada had a mythology (he took it for granted they were on a low cultural level) and Lur was their prime god or demon.

The journey continued, with frequent, though decreasing, recurrences of nausea for Pearl. Soon he became aware that they were landing again, that they were treading solid ground, were making for the depth of the ice. The motion of the boat still worked in his fantasy and the earth seemed to sway beneath him; this, with weariness and dimness of the fluorescence in the light, made the rest of the journey dream-like. Light began to glare in his eyes. A fire was turning. It illuminated the huge bastions of rock overhead, and he saw flecks of shining ice in cracks above them. Dozens of haadae seemed to have surrounded him; more animal, less human, in their multitude and their close neighborhood to him, than his solitary guide had seemed. He felt some fear, but more a ghastly inappropriateness. He wanted men, any men, even Volkner and Rhodes. He was too tired to do anything about these meaningless sloped heads and scaly faces. He could make no response at all. And then, lower down, closer to him, more mobile, came in throngs the broodlings, the puppies, the cubs, whatever you called them. Suddenly his mood changed. They were jolly little things. He laid his hand on one green head and smiled; the creature scurried away.

He never could remember much of that part of the days. There was more eating and drinking, there was continually coming and going of green forms, there were strange eyes luminous in the firelight; finally, there was sleep in some dark, apparently covered place.