ly important puzzle with at least a quarter of the necessary pieces
missing, or with unrelated bits from others intermixed. How much control
did a trained animal scout have over his furred or feathered
assistants? And was part of that mastery a mental rapport built up
between man and animal?

How well would the wolverines obey him now, especially when they would
not return to camp where cages stood waiting as symbols of human
authority? Wouldn't a trek into the wilderness bring about a revolt for
complete freedom? If Shann could depend upon the animals, it would mean
a great deal. Not only would their superior hunting ability provide all
three with food, but their scouting senses, so much keener than his,
might erect a slender wall between life and death.

Few large native beasts had been discovered on Warlock by the Terran
explorers. And of those four or five different species, none had proved
hostile if unprovoked. But that did not mean that somewhere back in the
wild lands into which Shann was heading there were no heretofore
unknowns, perhaps slyer and as vicious as the wolverines when they were
aroused to rage.

Then there were the "dreams," which had afforded the prime source of
camp discussion and dispute. Shann brushed coarse sand from his boots
and thought about the dreams. Did they or did they not exist? You could
start an argument any time by making a definite statement for or against
the peculiar sort of dreaming reported by the first scout to set ship on
this world.

The Circe system, of which Warlock was the second of three planets, had
first been scouted four years ago by one of those explorers traveling
solo in Survey service. Everyone knew that the First-In Scouts were a
weird breed, almost a mutation of Terran stock--their reports were rife
with strange observations.

So an alarming one concerning Circe (a yellow sun such as Sol) and her
three planets was not so rare. Witch, the world nearest in orbit to
Circe, was too hot for human occupancy without drastic and too costly
world-changing. Wizard, the third out from the sun, was mostly bare rock
and highly poisonous water. But Warlock, swinging through space between
two forbidding neighbors, seemed to be just what the settlement board
ordered.

Then the Survey scout, even in the cocoon safety of his well-armed ship,
began to dream. And from those dreams a horror of the apparently empty
world developed, until he fled the planet to preserve his san