top me?"

Shann shrugged. "When I first touched that thing I felt a shock. And
I've seen mind-controlled----" He could have bitten his tongue for
betraying that. The world of the mind-controlled was very far from the
life Thorvald and his kind knew.

"Very interesting," commented the other. "For one of so few years you
seem to have seen a lot, Lantee--and apparently remembered most of it.
But I would agree that you are right about this little plaything; it
carries a danger with it, being far less innocent than it looks." He
tore off one of the fluttering scraps of rag which now made up his
sleeve. "If you'll just remove your foot, we'll put it out of business
for now."

He proceeded to wrap the disk well in his bit of cloth, taking care not
to touch it again with his bare fingers while he stowed it away.

"I don't know what we have in this--a key to unlock a door, a trap to
catch the unwary. I can't guess how or why it works. But we can be
reasonably sure it's not just some carefree maiden's locket, nor the
equivalent of a credit to spend in the nearest bar. So it pointed me to
the sea, did it? Well, that much I am willing to allow. Maybe we'll be
able to return it to the owner, _after_ we learn who--or what--that
owner is."

Shann gazed down at the green water, opaque, not to be pierced to the
depths by human sight. Anything might lurk there. Suddenly the Throgs
became normal when balanced against an unknown living in the murky
depths of an aquatic world. Another attack on the Throg-held camp could
be well preferred to such exploration as Thorvald had in mind. Yet Shann
did not voice any protest as the Survey officer faced again in the same
direction as the disk had pointed him moments before.

8. UTGARD

A wind from the west sprang up an hour before sunset, lashing waves
inland until their spray was a salt mist in the air, a mist to sodden
clothing, plaster hair to the skull, leaving a brine slime across the
skin. Yet Thorvald hunted no shelter, in spite of the promise in the
rough shoreline at their backs. The sand in which their boots slipped
and slid was coarse stuff, hardly finer than gravel, studded with nests
of drift--bone-white or grayed or pale lavender--smoothed and stored by
the seasons of low tides and high, seasonal storms and hurricanes. A
wild shore and a forbidding one, to arouse Shann's distrust, perhaps a
fitting goal for that disk's guiding.

Shann had tasted loneliness in the moun