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Updated: June 20, 2025
And in that moment Dalgard had been forced to give up his plan for an unseen spy ring, which would depend upon the assistance of the animals. His information must come via his own eyes and ears. So he kept on, posting the last of the mermen in his mental relay well away from the city, but swimming upstream himself. Now that he was here, he could see no traces of the invaders.
And none of the mermen who had survived the battle which had raged through the city had seen any of the off-worlder's kind among the living or the dead of the alien forces. Perhaps, thinking Raf dead, they had returned to their space ship. Now there were other, more immediate, problems to be met.
And that was what burdened his heart, that for all the beauty he saw, there was no sound, no song of a single bird to comfort him. The mermen reached out their blue arms to him, and sang; on the top of the waves they sang, striving to make him forget the silence of the land below. They offered him the sea-life: why should he be drowned and die?
"When you destroyed the core of Those Other's holding, you gave us our chance. For had you not done that we, the mermen, the other harmless, happy creatures of this world, would have been wiped out. There would be no new beginning here, only a dark and horrible end."
Far out at sea the water is as blue as the bluest cornflower, and as clear as the clearest crystal; but it is very deep, too deep for any cable to fathom, and if many steeples were piled on the top of one another they would not reach from the bed of the sea to the surface of the water. It is down there that the Mermen live.
"You are free," he said. "The sea people won their freedom when Those Others fought among themselves. My people came across the star void in search of freedom, paying in blood to win it. But these, these are not the weapons of the free." He pointed to the supplies about the globe, to the globe itself. The mermen were waiting no longer.
"Children in the water, you strange little duck?" said the professor. "Yes," said Ellie. "I know there used to be children in the water, and mermaids too, and mermen. It hangs on the great staircase, and I have looked at it ever since I was a baby, and dreamt about it a hundred times; and it is so beautiful that it must be true."
The smaller mermen had no difficulty in getting through, but twice Raf's equipment belt caught on projections and he had to fight his way free. They crawled one by one into a ventilation shaft much like the one he had climbed at the Center. Dalgard's whisper reached him. "We are now in the building which houses their sky ship."
The sense of having all the kingdoms of the world spread out beneath one, together with most of the kingdoms of the mermen, has never so come to one's consciousness before. One goes to the seaside not for pomp and peacock's tails, but for saltness, Nature and a bite of fresh fish. To build a city there that shall not be an insult to the sentiment of the place is a matter of difficulty.
Dalgard heard it first, his landsman's ears serving him where the complicated sense which gave the sea people warning did not operate. That shrill keening he knew it of old. And at his warning the majority of the mermen plunged into the stream, becoming drifting shadows below the surface of the water. Only the four who were carrying the hammock stood their ground.
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