Caan’s wife worked with us—for women, even though married, were obliged to work for the public good a portion of the time. After Boy was born Nona, too, often joined us—though this was not obligatory, for the care of infant children discharged a woman of the debt of working otherwise.
There is so much that my memory holds to tell you of this strange Marinoid civilization! But you, with your life to live at high speed, would weary of me if I were not careful. You want everything at a glance—and you shall have it.
Let me say then that during this peaceful year there were occurring in Rax a series of mysterious incidents of an exceedingly sinister character—incidents which shortly were to lead us into the most stirring and critical period of Marinoid history. But we did not know this at the time. Life—wherever in the Universe it may be found—runs on a similar plan. It’s like a puzzle—a jigsaw puzzle whose picture remains undefined until you fit the last segment into place.
So it was with these ominous events that now occurred one by one in Rax. (And the absent Og, I may say, was at the bottom of them.) Each in itself seemed relatively unimportant. Yet all were part of a plan of destruction that was menacing us like an unseen sword hung suspended. We awoke to a realization of the danger, finally. You shall hear how it was I, who—when the thing at last struck home as a personal tragedy to me—played a leading part in the stirring scenes that followed.
May I ask you first to bear with me a moment more, while I give you a very brief summary of conditions in our Marinoid world? I know you will chafe. A thousand supposedly pressing duties of your own super-civilized life are forcing themselves upon you even at this moment of relaxation. Set them aside, I beg you. They are not nearly so important as you think. If you were to die tonight, leaving all of them undone—your world would go on as placidly as before.
A moment then—and you shall have action and movement to your heart’s content.
CHAPTER XV
The region of the Marinoids was a stretch of water bounded by great rocky cliffs on all sides. It was subterranean water—by which I mean that by ascending in it one came at last to a rocky ceiling. We were, at Rax, near the center of this subterranean sea. What was its extent, I cannot say. All measurements, all standards of comparison, were lost to me. In depth—at Rax—it might have been two thousand feet or more from the sea-floor to the ceiling above, which is to say some two or three times the depth of the city itself.
How many entrances there were from the outside world, I do not know. Through one of them Nona and I had come when Caan and his party first encountered us. To the Marinoids, who were not explorers, the idea of a surface to water was inexplicable. They could not conceive of such a thing; they could not understand it when I tried to explain it to them.
There were several Marinoid cities besides Rax, but none nearly so large. And there was—shall I say a rural?—population. In the great forests, Marinoid dwellings were occasionally to be found—isolated huts of sea-weed, clinging like bird-nests to the wavering branches of the trees. And in the open water other scattered families of a more adventurous turn, lived in huge shells from which they had excavated the living tissue—or lived in holes hollowed out of the banks of black ooze.