But she was not at home—nor could she be found anywhere in the city. Even this did not arouse much interest, except to her own immediate family. It was thought that some young Marinoid man had taken her for mate. According to custom the couple might readily have disappeared for a time—gone out together to live in the forest to escape work until their first period of love was past.
But there seemed no young man unaccounted for—and the girl did not return. Even so, the incident would have been forgotten, but soon another young girl disappeared.
There were perhaps thirty who vanished during that year. They were not all from the workers outside the city. We had long since ceased to take women with us; and those who lived in the forests and the mudbanks came crowding into Rax—and to the other cities nearby.
We knew very soon, of course, that our Marinoid women were being stolen. And there was one crowning incident that at last made us understand.
It was at what you would call midnight, when the city was asleep. Caan and I, on a belated errand, were swimming down one of the vertical streets. The place was deserted; the street was empty; the lights at intervals on the side walls of the houses illumined the water with a green, diffused glow—like lights in a thick fog at night on your Earth. The windows along the street for the most part stood open. Everywhere was heavy silence, with only the swish of the water as Caan and I swam through it.
A green figure in the horizontal street below us attracted our attention. It seemed to be a man swathed in a green cloak of seaweed. He saw us coming, and darting up to the street light which hung nearby, he flung something over it.
The light was obliterated; shadows fell over everything.
Caan and I were startled; we hung poised, just above the cross-street so that we could see along it in both directions. There were lights at distant corners. We heard a low but penetrating cry from near at hand. A signal! Other figures in the distance darted up through the water and put out the lights. The entire street was in darkness.
Caan and I whirled downward, shouting. Through the window of a house, we saw the stiffened body of a woman come floating. There was light enough for us to see her white face and arms—a woman unconscious, shocked into insensibility as we later learned, by a bolt of animal electricity from her abductor.
Her body floated from the window as though pushed from behind. In the darkness, green swathed forms seized it—forms which were barely discernible as blurs in the dark water—seized it and began rapidly towing it away.