"Say, look at these wing-shields!" From a recess in a corner of the room Venza appeared with an armful of the small shields. We thrust our hands and forearms into their loops. The shields extended from a few inches beyond our fingers to the elbow.
Snap had slid the window blind. I bent over the prone form of Meka. "Don't try to move. Molo will release you when he comes back."
We gathered on the starlit balcony. The city stretched around us. There was as yet no alarm. No swimming figures near here; but a distance away we saw the towering conclave globe, with its audience just beginning to emerge, like bees coming from a hive.
"Let me go first." I held Anita and Venza at the rail. "It's like swimming. I suppose we'll get the way of it pretty quickly."
I balanced on the rail, and then leaped off. With the others after me, we swam awkwardly upward into the reddish starlight.
The city structures dropped away, showing in a dark blur with winking lights. Over us were the stars and the cloudless night sky. Behind, the flashing light beams of radiance at the landing stage, the figures fluttering, the great globe, all dropped swiftly beneath a sharply curving horizon.
We had passed the city. A thousand feet below us, a dark forest stretched. It was beyond this that the control station was located.
The swimming flight became less awkward, but it was an effort in this abnormal Wandl air. Snap and Venza were behind me. Anita was leading, a strange, bird-like little figure. White blouse; long parted dark skirt from which her gray-sheathed legs kicked out as she swam, sometimes half upon one side, or with a breast stroke. The braids of her dark hair fell forward over her shoulders.
She was tiring: I could not miss it. How far had we gone? Ten miles, perhaps. There was only a small vista of this little world visible at once, it was so sharply convex. A line of distant mountains was to our left. We had crossed a river at the forest edge.
I suppose we had been half an hour swimming those ten-miles. Was daylight coming? It seemed that the sideline of mountain-tops had a little light on them. The opalescent beam from Earth had swept this portion of the sky and was gone below the horizon.