Henry Kuttner

“ He is not blind as other men are blind. He has a thousand eyes to see through. He had a vengeance to wreak. Some day that vengeance will be sated, when the last dark shambler dies. After that, Gresham will be content. He will give up his days then to looking at the world again through the strange, small lenses of other brains, and to the memory of beauty which he once saw so briefly, in the hour of its destruction, and will never see again. ”

“ Gresham shook his head irritably. “Just at the wrong spot and the wrong time? Maybe it was meant that way from the start. Predestination—how do I know? Oh, I had enough after the war. I bummed around the islands. I—like the sea.” His voice softened. “Like isn’t strong enough. I love the sea. I can’t stay away from it. There’s a fascination—I signed on here and there as a deck-hand, a stevedore—I didn’t care what. I just wanted to soak myself in the big things. Sun and sea and sky. Well, I can still feel the sun and the wind, and I can hear the water. ”

“ I can move through those wonderful cities again, and see the Swimmer’s people.” His voice faltered and he gave his mind up for an instant to the memory of that race and its beauty and wildness and strange, alien enchantment.
“The Swimmer himself had to stay,” Gresham said. “The machines—you’d never guess they were machines to see them—weren’t working well. All who could had to help the machines, help to keep the dark race—the Others—away from the cities. So the Swimmer’s mind let go of mine and I had to come back.”
“What can you do?” Black asked. “Is there any way to get in touch again?” ”

“ And in the underwater dawn-light I could see black shapes, shambling.
“If it hadn’t been for the dark people, the slaves, I think they might have won. They were getting the machines under control again, you see. In the last city the machine might have held out, if the Others hadn’t already been in the city.
“I made the shark swim closer, in through one of the dark cities where I’d gone with the Swimmer. Once it was full of lights and spiral dwellings, beautiful, lithe people gliding among the floating orbits of their homes. ”

“ Out of the immense ocean dawn above the ravening sharks come down silently, one by one, to kill and kill—and be killed. And on an island high over them, in the daylight he cannot see, a blind man sits on his beach with his strange sight focused in another world. ”

“ It’s instinct. There are things too degenerate to live.
“It’s all been going on down there for I don’t know how many centuries, how many milleniums. Think of it, Black! Empires rising and falling, races ruling and races enslaved, sciences developing along lines we’ll never understand and nobody guessing it until the Swimmer came to the surface.
“His race is intelligent. They must have realized the new radiations and the explosion had come from another intelligent race. They’ve seen sunken ships and drowned men, they knew we lived here in the air. But they’re so alien ... ”

“ 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. ”

“ An hour later they were back on deck. Black looked worried.
“Listen, Gresham,” he said earnestly. “I don’t know what’s happened to you. I admit that. The encephalogram was—puzzling. Your brain emits radiations that don’t check with anything we’ve seen before. Some peculiar things are possible, theoretically. For instance, a radio isn’t really likely to pick up transmitted waves, but it does. And telepathy’s theoretically possible. Suppose your brain has been altered a little by your exposure to the atomic blast. There are powers latent in the human mind, new senses that we know little about.” ”

“ But this is a completely new type of atomic blast. It isn’t uranium. It’s a controlled chain reaction based on an artificial element—there must be new types of radiation involved.”
“Fine. The next time there’s a war, we can blind everybody.” Gresham laughed grimly. “I’ll be sorry for myself for a few months, probably. Then I’ll get a Seeing-Eye dog and become a useful member of society again. ”

“ Then the Albacore went into a flurry of preparations. It was a miracle that the watch had sighted Gresham in his rubber boat, and a triple miracle that he was alive.
His eyes bandaged, he sat out on deck, while Black, the neurologist, leaned on the rail beside him and stared aft. Presently Black took out a pack of cigarettes, automatically held it out to Gresham, and then remembered that the man was blind.
“Cigarette?” he said.
“Yes, thanks. Is that you, Dr. Black?” Gresham’s voice was very low.
“Uh-huh. Here. I was watching that shark. He’s followed us from Suva.”
“Big one?” ”