Korree said back in a normal tone, "Animals. White light is hunting eater. I watch it."
"Here? In this tunnel?" asked Robin, startled.
"Not in tunnel," said the Glassie. "In new bubble-place."
Robin looked around. Sure enough he had not noticed the echo of their feet in the last few minutes. The floor had changed from rock to sandy dirt and he realized that he had lost some of the enclosed-air feeling. It was indeed a new bubble-cavern—but a lightless one!
Now, as he looked carefully, he realized that there were many lights around. There were tiny ones bobbing on the ground that were probably Moonworms. The others were almost certainly those of various animals. He took his flashlight out, suddenly clicked it on, and swung it around.
They were in an open area, sandy with sparse clumps of mushroomlike vegetation growing here and there. He caught the scurrying flash of several translucent animal bodies dodging out of sight from the unexpected light of his flash. And when the beam was off, he noticed the headlights returning, augmented in number.
"There are many bubble-places without light?" asked Robin.
"Many," said Korree. "Glassies not live there, but many animals hunt there."
Robin wondered whether there might in fact be more bubbles without light than with. He realized that that was probably the case; it very likely explained the nearly complete lack of pigment in the flesh of the native animals, the presence of the light stalks on all of them. It had probably evolved originally in lightlessness, and the Glassies had moved into the caverns fortunate enough to have natural phosphorescence only after they had discovered them much later in their history. This possibly also accounted for the single eye of Moon creatures—the conditions for the use of two eyes to develop perspective and delicate differentiations of shading and coloring simply never existed.
"Are there animals here without eye or light?" asked Robin thoughtfully.