earable.

Gerry glanced back. Closana was riding a few feet behind him, slender
and erect, controlling her restless dolphin as easily as though she had
been accustomed to such steeds all her life. Angus was grinning broadly
through his globular glass helmet as he sat astride a particularly big
dolphin and swung his light bladed water-sword from side to side.

"If any of our friends back on Earth could see us now in some sort of an
astral spectroscope," the big Scot cried, "they'd think themselves
crazy. Maybe this is only a nightmare at that! Do you think we'll wake
up soon and find ourselves safe back on board the _Viking_?"

"I'm afraid not," Gerry answered. He wondered in what part of this vast
sea the twisted hulk of the _Viking_ was now lying.

All day they rode, roughly following the shoreline to the northward.
Whenever it got so deep that nothing was visible below but a vast green
shadow Gerry headed inland until the tops of the sea gardens again came
into view. Sarnak had told them that by the middle of the next day it
should be safe for them to come above water and check their maps and put
fresh chemical cartridges in the cylinders of their helmets. The Scaly
Ones patrolled their coast line in shallow open boats, but they did not
go beyond their own borders.

Once Gerry checked his dolphin and then headed downward as he caught
sight of something big and dark lying on the sand. The others followed
him. It was the broken and rusting hulk of a space-ship, a vessel of a
strange type with a name in an unknown tongue still visible on the
shattered stern. The wreck must have been there for a very long time,
for the sand was heaped high about it and sea-weeds grew up through the
open hatches.

"Leaping ray-blasts!" McTavish said softly. "Yon craft never came from
either Earth or Mars."

"Probably from some far distant planet in outer space that we've never
heard of," Gerry said. "Some adventurous wanderer of the interstellar
regions who came to grief in this lonely spot."

* * * * *

It was desolate and forlorn, the sight of that wrecked vessel from so
long ago. It made Gerry think of his own lost command. There were clean
picked white bones of strange shape lying about on the sand. Gerry
saluted, a tribute to those strange and forgotten wanderers of space,
and then urged his dolphin to a higher level again.

When the dimming light showed that it was dusk above the water they r