"GOOD LORD!”
The tone rather than the words of that horrified exclamation awoke Dard and brought him up on the acceleration pad. Kimber, Rogan, and Cully were crowded together before the visa-screen. The hour might have been in the middle of the night, or late in the morning, for inside the ship day and night had no division. But on the screen it was day.
A gray sky was patched by ragged drifts of cloud. And as Dard leaned over the back of the pilot’s seat, he saw what had so startled the others.
Where the day before there had stretched that smooth sweep of blue sand, forming a carpet clear to the base of the colorful cliffs, there was now only water, a sheet of it. Rogan set the viewer to turning so that they could see the flood completely surrounded the ship. Even the river had been swallowed up without any red stain left to betray its flow.
As the scene reached the seaside Rogan pushed the button which held it there. The beach was gone, it was the sea which had come in to enclose them.
“Surprise, surprise!” that was Rogan. “Do we now swim ashore?”
“I don’t think that it is that deep,” answered Kimber.
“The water may come in this way during every hard storm. Switch over to the cliffs again, Les.”
The picture whizzed with a dizzy speed back to the cliff. Kimber was right, already there was a stretch of sand showing at the base of that rock escarpment. The water was draining away.
They clattered down through the quiet ship, sending out the ramp so that they could venture to the water’s swirl. A weak current swilled around the fins and the bare sand at the cliff grew wider as they watched.