Lundy wasn't surprised by the telepathic voice. Thought-communication
was commoner than speech and a lot simpler in many places on the
inhabited worlds. Special gave its men a thorough training in it.
"I live, thanks to you."
There was something in the quality of the brain he touched that puzzled
him. It was like nothing he'd ever met before.
He got to his feet, not very steadily. "You came just in time. How did
you know I was here?"
"Your fear-thoughts carried to us. We know what it is to be afraid. So
we came."
"There's nothing I can say but 'Thank you'."
"But of course we helped! Why not? You needn't thank us."
Lundy looked at the flowers burning sullenly in the gloom. "How is it
you can boss them around? Why don't they...."
"But they're not cannibals! Not like--_The Others_." There was pure
cold dread in that last thought.
"Cannibals." Lundy looked up at the cloud of dainty blue-grey
woman-things. His skin got cold and a size too small for him.
Their soft golden eyes smiled down at him. "We're different from you,
yes. Just as we're different from the fish. What is your thought?
Bright things growing--weed--yes, they're kin to us."
Kin, thought Lundy. Yeah. About like we are to the animals. Plants.
Living plants were no novelty on Venus. Why not plants with thinking
minds? Plants that carried their roots along with them, and watched you
with sad soft eyes.
"Let's get out of here," said Lundy.
They went down along the dark tunnel and out onto the road, and the
flowers yearned like hungry dogs after Lundy but didn't touch him. He
started out across the narrow plain, with the plant-women drifting
cloudlike around him.
Seaweed. Little bits of kelp that could talk to you. It made Lundy feel
queer.
The city made him feel queer, too. It was dark when he first saw it
from the plain, with only the moonlight glow of the sand to touch it.
It was a big city, stretching away behind its barrier wall. Big and
silent and very old, waiting there at the end of its road.
It was curiously more real in the dim light. Lundy lost trace of the
water for a moment. It was like walking toward a sleeping city in the
moonlight, feeling the secretive, faintly hostile strength of it laired
and leashed, until dawn....
Only there would never be a dawn for this city. Never, any more.
Lundy wanted suddenly to run away.
"Don't be afraid. We live there. It's safe."
Lundy shook his head irritably. Quite suddenly the brilliant light
flared out again, three regular flashes. It seemed to come from
somewhere to the right, out of a range of undersea mountains. Lundy
felt a faint trembling of the sand. A volcanic fissure, probably,
opened when the land sank.
The golden light changed the city again. Cloud-cuckoo land at sunset--a
place where you could set your boots down on a dream.
When he went in through the gates he was awed, but not afraid. And
then, while he stood in the square looking up at the great dim
buildings, the thought came drifting down to him out of the cloud of
little woman-things.
"It _was_ safe. It was happy--before _She_ came."
* * * * *