The boat was filling, sinking stern first. I dove over its side, into the wave-whipped sea. The sinking boat sucked me under. But I came up. Around me was a white, tumultuous darkness. Overhead the storm clouds had broken into a rift; the yellow moonlight came through. Something was floating near me, some wreckage from the boat, a gas-filled pontoon. I seized it. Behind me, our boat from the island was approaching. Then I saw, upraised near me by a surging wave-crest, a human figure struggling. Sonya, struggling to keep Altho above the water. I reached them. “Sonya! Here, hold to this! I’ve got him!” A sea animal went by us with a rush. Our pursuing boat drew up; its black side was a wall above us. The insulating side-shield rolled back. Anxious men’s faces stared down at us over the gunwale. Arms came down and hauled us up. I heard Alice’s voice; and Dolores’s, “Len! And Sonya . . . and the prince! Thank God you’re all safe!” And from far over the land came the scream of Jim’s siren, the signal of victory there. XVIII THE GREAT RIDDLE The homecoming! The return of our war-racked forces to the city, with half its suburbs burned, and a thousand of its people killed by Talon’s bombardment! I shall not describe the cheers, the laughter, the sobbing. Victory in war can seem to be so little better than defeat! All the paeans of triumph cannot heal the maimed, or bring back the dead. I was king no longer, for our prince now was ruler, with Sonya for his queen. I was glad to be released. There is a very false, a pseudo-glory, in ruling a nation. But Altho would not have me wholly resign. My promised reforms, my earthly ideas of government, were needed here. And so they called me premier, and thrived upon a crude but humane version of what we on earth would call a civilized government: a veneration of the aged, a new idea of infant welfare, a monogamy of marriage with the surplus women doing their rational work in art and industry. Of Talon’s thousands, fully half of them escaped back into the mountains. They are there now. They will always be a menace. But there is not a race of humans in all the universe unmenaced by something. The very essence of human existence is struggle. We do not think of Talon’s brutes now as the Nameless Horror, and we are always prepared. It was shortly after my marriage to Alice, that one evening I came upon Jim and Dolores in each other’s arms. “Well!” I said. “What’s this?” He kissed her again. “I loved her right from the beginning,” he declared. Which was not exactly true, but I knew he thought so. I had never seen little Dolores so radiant. “And I always loved him, Len. You know that.” I did indeed. And she had never wavered in that love, from the days when he had seized the little blind child and whirled her in the air.