Darr Veter felt a vague anxiety when more than a minute passed and the bold girl did not reappear. He, too, began looking for a stone, assuming that he would need one much bigger. He had just taken hold of an eighty-pound lump of andesite when Miyiko came to the surface. The girl was breathing heavily and seemed fatigued. “There,” she gasped, “there’s a horse.” “What? What horse?”
‘‘A huge statue of a horse, down there, in a natural niche. I’m going back to take a proper look.”
‘‘Miyiko, it’s too difficult for you. Let’s swim bade to the beach and get diving gear and a boat.”
‘‘Oh, no. I want to look at it myself, now! Then it will be my own achievement, not something done by a machine. We’ll call the others afterwards.”
“All right, I’m coining with you!” Darr Veter seized his big stone and the girl laughed.
“Take a smaller one, that one will do. And what about your breathing?”
Darr Veter obediently performed the necessary exercises and then dived into the water with the stone in his hands. The water struck him in the face and turned him with his back to Miyiko; something was squeezing his chest and there was a dull pain in his ears. He clenched his teeth, strained every muscle in his body to fight against pain. The pleasant light of day was rapidly lost as he entered the cold grey gloom of the depths. The cold, hostile power of the deep water momentarily overpowered him, his head was in a whirl, there was a stinging pain in his eyes. Suddenly Miyiko’s firm hand seized him by the shoulder and his feet touched the firm, dully silver sand. With difficulty he turned his head in the direction she indicated; he staggered, dropped the stone in his surprise and shot immediately upwards. He did not remember how he got to the surface, he could see nothing but a red mist and his breathing was spasmodic. In a short time the effects of the high pressure wore off and that which he had seen was reborn in his memory. He had seen the picture for an instant only but his eye had seen and his brain recorded many details.
The dark cliffs formed a lofty lancet arch under which stood the gigantic statue of a horse. Neither seaweed nor barnacles marred the polished surface of the carving.
The unknown sculptor had endeavoured mainly to depict strength. The fore part of the body was exaggerated, the tremendous chest given abnormal width and the neck sharply curved. The near foreleg was raised so that the rounded knee-cap was thrust straight at the viewer while the massive hoof almost touched the breast. The other three legs were strained in an effort to lift the animal from the ground giving the impression that the giant horse was hanging over the viewer to crush him with its fabulous strength. The mane on the arched neck was depicted as a toothed ridge, the jowl almost touched the breast and there was ominous malice in eyes that looked out from under the lowered brow and in the stone monster’s pressed-back ears.
Miyiko was soon satisfied that Darr Veter was unharmed, left him stretched out on a flat stone slab and dived once again into the water. At last the girl had worn herself out with her deep diving and had seen enough of her treasure. She sat down beside Veter and did not speak until her breathing had again become normal.
“I wonder how old that statue can be?” Miyiko asked herself thoughtfully.
Darr Veter shrugged his shoulders and then suddenly remembered the most astonishing thing about the horse.
‘“Why is there no seaweed or barnacles on the statue?”
Miyiko turned swiftly towards him.
“Oh, I’ve seen such things before. They were covered with some special lacquer that does not permit living things to attach themselves to it. That means that the statue must belong approximately to the Fission Age.”
A swimmer appeared in the sea between the shore and the island. As he drew near he half rose out of the water and waved to them. Darr Veter recognized the broad shoulders and gleaming dark skin of Mven Mass. The tall black figure was soon ensconced on the stones and a good-natured smile spread over the face of the new Director of the Outer Stations. He bowed swiftly to little Miyiko and with an expansive gesture greeted Darr Veter.
“Renn Bose and I have come here for one day to ask your advice.”
“Who is Renn Bose?”
“A physicist from the Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge.”
“I think I’ve heard of him, he works on space-field relationship problems, doesn’t he? Where did you leave him?”
‘“On shore. He doesn’t swim, not as well as you, anyway.”
A faint splash interrupted Mven Mass. “I’m going to the beach, to Veda,” Miyiko called out to them from the water. Darr Veter smiled tenderly at the girl.
“She’s going back with a discovery,” he explained to Mven Mass and told him about the finding of the submarine horse. The African listened but showed no interest. His long fingers were fidgeting and fumbling at his chin. In the gaze he fixed on Darr Veter the latter read anxiety and hope.
“Is there anything serious worrying you? If so, why put it off?”
Mven Mass was not loath to accept the invitation. Seated on the edge of a cliff over the watery depths that bid the mysterious horse he spoke of his vexatious waverings. His meeting with Renn Bose had been no accident. The vision of the beautiful world known as Epsilon Tucanae had never left him. Ever since that night he had dreamed of approaching this wonderful world, of overcoming, in some way, the great space separating him from it, of doing something so that the time required to send a message there and receive an answer would not be six hundred years, a period much greater than a man’s lifetime. He dreamed of experiencing at first hand the heartbeat of that wonderful life that was so much like our own, of stretching out his hand across the gulf of the Cosmos to our brothers in space. Mven Mass concentrated his efforts on putting himself abreast of unsolved problems and unfinished experiments that had been going on for thousands of years for the purpose of understanding space I as a function of matter. He thought of the problem Veda Kong had dreamed of on the night of her first broadcast to the Great Circle.
In the Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge Renn Bose, a young specialist in mathematical physics, was in charge of these researches. His meeting with Mven Mass and their subsequent friendship was determined by a similarity of endeavour.
Renn Bose was by that time of the opinion that the problem had been advanced sufficiently to permit of an experiment, but it was one that could not be done at laboratory level, like everything else Cosmic in scale. The colossal nature of the problem made a colossal experiment necessary. Renn Bose had come to the conclusion that the experiment should be carried out through the outer stations with the employment of all terrestrial power resources, including the Q-energy station in the Antarctic.
A sense of danger came to Darr Veter when he looked into Mven’s burning eyes and at his quivering nostrils.
“Do you want to know what I should do?” He asked this decisive question calmly.
Mven Mass nodded and passed his tongue over his dry lips.
“I should not make the experiment,” said Darr Veter, carefully stressing every word and paying no attention to the grimace of pain that flashed across the African’s face so swiftly that a less observant man would not have noticed it.
“That’s what I expected!” Mven Mass burst out. “Then why did you consider my advice to have any importance?”
“I thought we should be able to convince you.” “All right, then, try! We’ll swim back to the others.
They’re probably getting diving apparatus ready to examine the horse!”
Veda was singing and two other women’s voices were accompanying her.
When she noticed the swimmers she beckoned to them, motioning with the fingers of her open hand like a child. The singing stopped. Darr Veter recognized one of the women as Evda Nahl, although this was the first time he had seen her without her white doctor’s smock. Her tall, pliant figure stood out amongst the others on account of her white, still untanned skin. The famous woman psychiatrist had apparently been busy and had not had time for sunbathing. Evda’s blue-black hair, divided into two by a dead straight parting, was drawn up high above her temples. High cheek-bones over slightly hollow cheeks served to stress the length of her piercing black eyes. Her face bore an elusive resemblance to an ancient Egyptian sphinx, the one that in very ancient days stood at the desert’s edge beside the pyramid tombs of the kings of the world’s oldest state. The deserts have been irrigated for many centuries, the sands are dotted with groves of rustling fruit-trees and the sphinx itself still stands there under a transparent plastic shade that does not hide the hollows of its time-eaten face.