Thomas had reserved for himself the visual observation of the kelp-free pocket through which they were descending. It was a column of clear water about four hundred meters in diameter, a Pandoran “lagoon.” They had not yet descended into the dark regions where the kelp played its light show.

Panille had been fascinated by the name lagoon when he had heard it. Ship had displayed an Earthside lagoon for him once—palm trees, an outrigger with white sails. Would Pandora ever see such play upon its seas?

He found himself acutely aware of every sensory impression about this experience. It was the stuff of countless poems. There was the faint hiss of air being recycled, the smell of human bodies too close and exuding their unspoken fears. He liked the way the red light played off the ladder which ran up to the hatch.

When Thomas had used the word lagoon to describe their destination, Panille had said: “The persistence of atavism.” The remark had provoked a startled glance from Thomas.

Waela marked their descent past eighty-five meters and called it out. She leaned close to the screen which displayed the lagoon’s nearest wall of encaging kelp. The long strands angled down into darkness with an occasional black tentacle reaching out toward the sub. The external dive lights played green shadows on the pale kelp, revealing small dark extrusions, bubbles whose purpose remained undiscovered. Farther down, such bubbles played their bright patterns of light.

The water around the kelp strands and in the upper lagoon was aswarm with darting and slow-moving shapes, some with many eyes and some with none. Some were thin and worm-like, some fat and ponderous with long fleshy fins and toothless gaping jaws. None had ever been known to attack Shipmen and it was thought they lived in symbiosis with the kelp. Taking them for specimens aroused the kelp to violence and when they were removed from the sea, they melted so rapidly that mobile labs appeared to be the only way to examine them. But mobile labs did not survive long here.

Farther down, Waela knew, there would be fewer and fewer of these creatures. Then the sub would enter the zone of crawlers, things which moved along the kelp and across the sea floor. A few large swimmers there, but crawlers dominated.