We held our breaths. The thing went past us—quietly, without seeming to notice us. It was a ribbon-like thing thirty feet long, two feet high, and no more than a few inches thick. A pallid white ribbon of puffy slime, frayed and tattered at its edges, it undulated gruesomely from end to end. In a moment it was gone, into that void of ink from whence it had come.
Again we descended. Other creatures passed us—headless things of black with illuminated parasites clinging to them; great fishes, star-shaped, with a brilliant green head in the center and each point of the star as long as our bodies; fishes, or were they animals? that were all head, it seemed.
We took heart, for none seemed to notice us. But there was a balloon of white jelly. It floated past us quite close. It was larger than any one of us. It seemed harmless and Atar swam beside it. Then suddenly the thing expanded, lost all its form and like a cloud of white mist, enveloped him. He screamed and we rushed to his rescue.
In an instant we were all three plunged into a confused, frantic horror for which I can find no words. Like thick white glue that was sticky, yet slimy, this almost imponderable stuff fought with us! Fought, I say—for it was using an intelligence against us! We floundered, flailing the water with frantic arms and legs. A noisome stench from the gluey stuff sickened us; the feel of it made our flesh crawl and the gorge rise in our throats. It was uncannily flimsy stuff. We could tear it into shreds, fling it away; but always it came back, to weld itself together. There was an intelligence in it! Not a centralized power of thought, like a brain, but an instinct for battle that must have been inherent in every smallest fibre of it.
We escaped at last. How, I do not know. Perhaps the thing wearied of us. And as we struggled away exhausted, with its horrible gluey particles which we had breathed in choking our lungs—we saw it floating off, ragged but still balloon-like, its original shape almost unimpaired.
We reached at last the bottom of the void. It was not level, but tumbled as though some cataclysm of nature had tossed it about. Banks of black ooze, a hundred feet high, were honeycombed with holes; valleys were beside them—valleys bristling with stalactites of black and white coral which stood up like pointed spears to impale the unwary trespasser. And there were miniature volcanic-looking peaks—cone-shaped. From one of them a stream of water almost hot, was issuing.
Frequently now, we saw lights; and all of them were the naturally lighted heads and bodies of swimming creatures. They moved about lazily, confidently, ignoring us; and we knew that when they were hungry they would feed, either upon others smaller of their kind—or upon us.
Over this tumbled, broken sea-bottom—where occasionally a giant crab or something of the kind would scuttle from a shadow into one of the deeper shadowed holes—we swam at an altitude of about fifty feet. We carried no light; and our bodies were shrouded in green-black cloaks. We still held our spears—poor, useless, futile things! Yet, as Atar said, they might not be useless against humans. And it was the humans, with their greater intelligence, that we now feared most. Conditions of life here in the Water of Wild Things, now became plain to us. These wild creatures were for the most part inoffensive up to the point of satisfying their own need for food. They fed upon each other and thus reduced their number. The humans, in open battle with them, were doubtless helpless. But the humans had the intelligence to hide—to escape. And the creatures of the wild did not bother unduly to pursue them.
Does this seem illogical to you? I assure you, it is not. The conditions we found, here in the Water of Wild Things, in the bowels of that meteor flying amid the Rings of Saturn, were almost identical with those which prevailed in the early periods of your own Earth’s history. There is not, and never has been, a wild creature as predatory, as ferocious as Man himself. Your lion and tiger are cowards unless spurred by fright or hunger. The wild animals of your Earth would have been glad to live at peace with Mankind. It has been Man himself who consistently has been the aggressor.