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are left with the likely truth.”
    “Which is?” grunted Hartlund needlessly.
    “That something—or rather some
one
—down there
helped
Luke and either resuscitated him or kept him alive.”

VII
    Kept him alive
.
    For Peter the words had an ominous ring, and a picture came unbidden to his mind. A picture of a coelacanth, caught when “old fourlegs” was still regarded as a fantastic impossibility in the living state, moving despondently in the tank where his captors had placed him, dying by inches because they did not know and he could not say that sunlight was unbearable to him.
    And after it came impressions of specimens in an aquarium. Because if this were true, and something intelligent did move and live down
there
, it could only be alien to man.
    A babble of excited talk, half contradictory, half in agreement with the logic of Gordon’s remarks, was running round the table. The Chief let it continue for a moment, then snapped its thread.
    “All right. Unless someone really has a valid counter-explanation,I want discussion of further activities. We are limited by supplies and the capacity of our equipment. I want to know what really is down there. On the other hand, it looks beyond doubt that it’s far too big for us few to handle with what we’ve got.” A hand went up. “Ellington?”
    “Chief, I’d like to hear what Luke has to say.”
    “Impossible. We’re going to let him sleep the clock round. I’ve had the bones of his story, and Eloise gave them to you, and so did Dick. We can only hope sleep will clear his mind. On his own admission, he’d become delirious by the time he was found. If not, we’ll have to hunt for ourselves. Platt?”
    The engineer officer was frowning. “I wish I could see for myself what’s under us. All I can do is make suggestions. I, vote we undertake one more dive, with every bit of equipment I can secure to the ’nef. I’m divided between sending two as crew, for the sake of the longer time they could stay under, or three, allowing two to be working outside.”
    “It’ll have to be two. Dick and Eloise have to rest for forty-eight hours, and Luke isn’t going to be fit. Or even if he is, I won’t let him dive again till he’s had a proper hospital examination. That leaves Mary and Peter. By the way, where is Mary?” The Chief glanced round.
    “Keeping guard on Luke,” said Peter,
    “All right. Yes, for a full-scale exploration we’d need the Russian ’nef as well as our own, and I’m pretty sure they will agree to come. And for lack of anything better we must invite the French to loan a couple of their ’scaphes. Too, the British have been trying out a new ultradeep TV drogue, which will go down deeper than a ’nef has been taken so far.”
    “And which won’t show much except ooze,” said Dick Loescher baldly. “Chief, to get at all there is down there, we’ll have to invent whole new fleets of gadgets. Hell, burrowing into four thousand feet of mud
above
water would be a problem!”
    “Agreed. But for the first time,” Gordon pointed out, “we have something as spectacular as the space research programcan offer. More so! I’ve been wondering, actually, if they will find traces of this civilization on the moon. Perhaps, if they got so far as they seem to have done. And besides, in view of what happened to Luke, do you think we’ll have to do it all ourselves?”
    “You think there may be a friendly intelligent race down there?” Hartlund put it into words.
    “If we accept the only reasonable explanation for Luke’s escape,” shrugged Gordon, “there must be.”
    As they neared their goal, while Mary hunted for the distinctive sonar echo that would guide them in, Peter stared through the exiguous windows. He wondered if he would see anything, if Luke had seen anything. Luke was still asleep when the ’nef had started down.
    They had long ago left the levels at which the sea teemed in a manner befitting its role as the cradle of life.