Polly was saying: “A mermaid! A passing fishing roamer saw it at dawn a week ago. They didn’t speak of it officially on the air, but yesterday, when they got back to Suva, the sailors told of it. A mermaid, sitting on the coral beach before the dawn, braiding her seaweed hair! They saw her, from miles away with the glasses. The ship had no electric image-finders. But they saw her sitting there. And some of the sailors swear that in the silence of the dawn they could hear her singing, but that’s nonsense. I suppose the master had official instructions to avoid such a thing, so he kept on going and did not land. The sailors, some of them, were frightened. But others wanted to land and capture the mermaid. Can you imagine--superstitious ignorant men in this day and age!” She was breathlessly excited. A mermaid, on a desert, south sea beach, sitting braiding her seaweed hair, singing to the sailors of a passing ship. The world was laughing at the tale. Arturo said, very quietly: “You’d better tell us, father, what is going to be done. Jeff doesn’t understand fully yet.” The tray of food stood neglected. Dr. Plantet lighted a cigarette and sat back apparently relaxed. He spoke quietly, at first precisely, as though carefully choosing his words to my understanding; but there was in his voice a grim sense of power, and his burning eyes clung steadily to my face. “Jeff, this is no new thing to me. This culmination is, I grant; I had never thought of actually living to see it. But the possibility. Jeff, for years I have been studying what, in popular language, they call ‘our unknown earth.’ What lies within our globe. Beneath the surface of our seas, that we know. But deeper still--beyond, beneath the ocean bottom--then what? Some six miles it is, Jeff, from the summit of Mount Everest to the ocean level. And another six miles to the abyss of the Nero Deep. Twelve miles or so. What is that? Our globe has eight thousand miles of interior. We humans have brought a scant twelve miles within our ken. Twelve miles out of eight thousand. Infinitesimal. It sounds incredible--but it is true. And yet some of us think we know something about our world. We do not--for most of it is as unknown to us as the moon. “These vast oceans, this hydrosphere of ours, embraces nearly three-quarters of the earth’s surface. You know its mean depth is not much over two miles. We think of these oceans as tremendous--this gigantic layer of water, so enormous of volume. It is not. On an orange it would represent an uneven skin thin as tissue paper. Compared to the wholly unknown interior volume of our earth, that’s all it is--a film-layer of water, like tissue paper on an orange. Insects, crawling on the tissue wrapping--what do they know of the orange?”