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streamline. For a moment Grant was seriously angry at him, for taking such a chance with him on his first dive. Still breathing deeply, though slower and slower now as his heart and adrenal glands got back to normal, Grant watched in a kind of witless stupor as Bonham got smaller and smaller and smaller. A few feet above the bottom the big man leveled off over a huge coral toadstool and rolled over face up, and slowly sank to a cross-legged sitting position on it, his head back looking up, for all the world like some great, oneeyed humanoid alien frog from Alpha Centauri or somewhere. Still looking up, he motioned for Grant to come on down. Still staring, still breathing deeply from his fright in the narrow entrance, Grant suddenly realized with a start which brought him back out of his post-panic stupor that he was lying here all stretched out forty feet up in the air from this other man, relaxed, his arms out over his head like a man in a bed. Because it really could have been air. Seemed like air. The green-tinted water was crystal clear here inside, and Bonham by seating himself on the toadstool had avoided stirring up any sand clouds as they had done outside. For the first time with any real physical appreciation, Grant realized how delicious it was to be totally without gravity like one of the great planing birds; he could go up, he could go down, he could stay right where he was; in the strange spiritual excitement of it, his fear left him completely. Feeling ridiculous again because of his recent panic there, he glanced once at the narrow entrance fissure, then rolled over head down using exactly (though slower) the same body movements he once used to do a full-twisting half gainer, and corkscrewed gently down—relishing the leisurely control—into a vertical dive, his hands and arms straight back along his thighs palms up, his fins beating lazy and slow, as he had seen Bonham do. Only once did he have to clear his ears, and he did it now without pausing. Below him Bonham got larger and larger. Then, duplicating Bonham’s maneuver, he rolled over onto his back, exhaled and sank into a sitting position on the giant toadstool beside him, his knees clasped up to his chin. Unable to speak, or even to grin, he gesticulated wildly and waggled his eyebrows to show his enthusiasm. The big man nodded vigorously, then touching him gently, pointed upward, sweeping his arm across the view like a man unveiling a painting. For the first time since he had entered, Grant looked up.
    What he saw very nearly took away the breath he had just regained. He was in an immense cavern at least sixty feet high. Apparently the bottom here inside was ten or so feet lower than the sand channel bottom outside. From where he sat at one end the other was almost lost in a hazy near-invisibility. In the dim ceiling a dozen holes allowed clusters of greenish sunrays to strike at varying angles across the interior until they shattered against the sand bottom or rock walls. Each beam wherever it struck against bottom or walls revealed weird outlandish coral sculptures. It was more than breathtaking, it was like having stumbled upon some alien cathedral on some other planet, which some otherworld race with their incomprehensible architecture and alien sculpture had ages past built, decorated and dedicated to their unknowable God. Grant was suddenly frightened again, not physically this time, but spiritually. For a moment he forgot he was diving underwater in an aqualung. Was that some four-headed Great Saint whom they worshipped, there on the side wall? Was that seventy-eyed monster, all head and almost no body, resting on the sand floor, the Great Being Himself? And as always, when he found himself alone in an empty church—as he had when a boy, as he had when visiting the great churches and cathedrals of Europe and found one or another of them deserted—Grant felt himself beginning to get an erection in the dim stillness. Was it the privacy? Was it