The Man on the Meteor by Ray Cummings

We entered the opening, swimming in a group with Atar leading. It was already new territory for us. Our hunting expeditions had never taken us even as far as this; we were always content to remain in Marinoid waters. As we advanced, the rocky ceiling overhead was closing down on us, until soon there was no more than twice the length of our bodies between it and the floor.

On both sides the dark water stretched out as far as we could see into blackness also. We were descending now at an angle of perhaps forty-five degrees.

We had gone what you would call a mile possibly, when we came suddenly to a tangle of coral-a barrier that reached from floor to ceiling. I call it coral. It might have been a petrified vegetation. An all but impenetrable thicket-white like the frosted underbrush of your Northern winter forests-it seemed to bar our further progress.

We stopped; consulted, and swam to the left and right. But the tangle extended in both directions to the edges of the mile-wide passageway.

"It is this," said Atar, "which keeps our own region free of monsters. They cannot easily pass a barrier like this. " He was smiling at Caan and me. "To this, perhaps we owe our safety."

Caan was poking at the thicket, and we found after a moment that we could with difficulty force our way through it.

The realization that Atar's words brought us was at once reassuring and alarming. If no creatures of the wild could pass this barrier, what then might lie on its other side?

Caan, older and more poised than either Atar or me, was wasting no time on such thoughts.

"Come," he said. "Here we can get through."

The white underbrush must have extended for several hundred feet back and downward. We forced our bodies through it, seeking small orifices, bending aside the twigs, or breaking them off for they were very brittle.

We were an hour or more getting through. A few small bottle-shaped fish with protruding, ball-like eyes on the sides of the head, lurked here and there. They watched us curiously-unafraid, almost resentful it seemed, with their sidelong glances and their hasteless movements to avoid us. But we paid them little heed, for such as they often wandered into Marinoid waters and were easily killed with our spears.

The tangle of white underbrush gave way at last into open water. Again we saw the ceiling and floor close together-the same narrow slit sloping sharply downward.

With the white underbrush gone, the water seemed darker-so dark that we could hardly see each other a few lengths away. It was warmer too-unpleasantly warm; and to our nostrils came the taint of that stench now unmistakable.

We had been swimming downward for what seemed an interminable time when abruptly the floor beneath us dropped away into a perpendicular cliff. Simultaneously the ceiling had heightened-disappeared into the watery shadows. We found ourselves poised with a vast void of ink before us. It might have been illimitable for all we could see of its boundaries. And empty! There was nothing but blackness-but it was that pregnant blackness that seems, not empty but merely to conceal.

"We must go down," said Atar. I could hear that he was trying to keep his voice steady. "They would live-down on the sea-bottom."

We descended along the side of the perpendicular cliff. A thousand feet? Three thousand? I cannot say. The water grew steadily warmer until its heat began seriously to oppress us. The thought came to me suddenly that we were well into the bowels of my meteor; its internal fires, now very close perhaps, were heating the water. My meteor! How remote the outside world-the outer surface-the Heavens-Saturn-the stars and the vast, unfathomable distances of the Stellar Universe-seemed to me now! I had been born out there somewhere. It was the first time in ages that such a memory had crossed my mind.

"Look! " cried Caan softly.

We huddled together against that black cliff-face. Below us in the void, a glowing point of light was moving. It seemed miles away; but it was no more than twenty or thirty feet, for as it approached we saw it was a long, sinuous thing with an illuminated head-a head that glowed phosphorescent-luridly green.

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.