Kort felt his calmness in strange contrast to the fury raging within himself--fury that mindless things from the sea should set at nought the intelligence and courage of some fifty men. What price intelligence? An ameoba, incapable of sensing the approach of death, was better off than they who could foresee, and fear, and do nothing at all to escape, extinction. What was the _kilwanni_--the coming storm--but a conglomeration of ions, dead and unintelligent, possessed of no will either benevolent or malevolent, yet destined for all that to shatter the _Mermaid_ and commit them to death in the freezing sea--those who escaped a fiery but swifter death from the storm itself. He followed Hodge silently back to the pilot house. Two seamen waited there, grim faced. "Three of them by the cannery boilers," one man said. "They got Sanderson before he could clear out." That was all. They stared at Hodge, waiting for him to speak. The grizzled first mate shook his head. "I know," said Kort suddenly, and all eyes turned to him. "The bullets were too slow--but the blaster was too fast. A bolt lasts only a few micro-seconds." "How d'you mean?" "You remember when D'loo first talked about a ghost snake? He hadn't seen the one on the net, but only the one that killed Twahna, and _nobody had fired a shot at it_." "But he saw it come through the bulkhead," Hodge pointed out. "That's what threw us off the track, but that wasn't the only reason D'loo called it the 'ghost snake.' Nor was it because they flicker before bullets. Have you ever known a native who cared to see ordinary cinema films?" "Nope," grunted Hodge, plainly mystified. "Nor one who'd let a newsreel man photograph him. They call 'em the ghost pictures. Say--!" "There you are. They fight shy of the films because they don't get the illusion of motion, as we do. All they see is a quick-fading succession of stills, because the natives don't have persistence of vision, as we have. The films don't fool them as they do us. Nor do those things out there. To us they look solid. To D'loo they flicker constantly--ninety-nine percent of the time they literally aren't there. They have a vibratory existence, like the image we seem to see on the cinema screen. Back in the twentieth century it was shown that the probability wave representing an electron extended, theoretically, to infinity. In these things free will--the life force--enters to control that mathematical probability. They can literally be two places at once--on the bottom, three miles down, and on our deck--at the same time.