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 rode in to the four-fathom shallows and halted in a smooth patch of yellow sand. Gerry unsaddled the dolphins and tethered them to lumps of coral where they browsed contentedly on the short vegetation. Then the three exiles sat down in a circle on the sand. McTavish stretched his long legs, bouncing a few feet off the ground as he did so and then floating slowly down again. "I'll never forget this journey if I live to be older than the whole Solar System itself!" he said. "Also--I'm hungry." "There's nothing we can do about that until noon tomorrow," Gerry grunted. "Maybe the fasting will make you lose some of that surplus bulk of yours. But I'll admit I could do with some of that special coffee Portok used to brew in the ward room on the _Viking_ in the evenings." "I'd give a lot for a drink of plain water," Closana said wistfully. "Acres of water around us and nothing to drink!"