e while ago I got to thinking that I
wasn't here at all, that I might be dreaming it all. Then I met you."

Thorvald understood. "Yes, but this _could_ be a dream meeting. How can
we tell?" He hesitated, almost diffidently, before he asked: "Have you
met anyone else here?"

"Yes." Shann had no desire to go into that.

"People out of your past life?"

"Yes." Again he did not elaborate.

"So did I." Thorvald's expression was bleak; his encounters in the fog
must have proved no more pleasant than Shann's. "That suggests that we
do trigger the hallucinations ourselves. But maybe we can really lick it
now."

"How?"

"Well, if these phantoms are born of our memories there are about only
two or three we could see together--maybe a Throg on the rampage, or
that hound we left back in the mountains. And if we do sight anything
like that, we'll know what it is. On the other hand, if we stick
together and one of us sees something that the other can't ... well,
that fact alone will explode the ghost."

There was sense in what he said. Shann aided the officer to his feet.

"I must be a better subject for their experiments than you," the older
man remarked ruefully. "They took me over completely at the first."

"You were carrying that disk," Shann pointed out. "Maybe that acted as a
focusing lens for whatever power they use to make us play trained
animals."

"Could be!" Thorvald brought out the cloth-wrapped bone coin. "I still
have it." But he made no move to pull off the bit of rag about it.
"Now"--he gazed at the wall of green--"which way?"

Shann shrugged. Long ago he had lost any idea of keeping a straight
course through the murk. He might have turned around any number of times
since he first walked blindly into this place. Then he pointed to the
packet Thorvald held.

"Why not flip that?" he asked. "Heads, we go that way--" he indicated
the direction in which they were facing--"tails, we do a
rightabout-face."

There was an answering grin on Thorvald's lips. "As good a guide as any
we're likely to find here. We'll do it." He pulled away the twist of
cloth and with a swift snap, reminiscent of that used by the Warlockian
witch to empty the bowl of sticks, he tossed the disk into the air.

It spun, whirled, but--to their open-jawed amazement--it did not fall to
the sand. Instead it spun until it looked like a small globe instead of
a disk. And it lost its dead white for a glow of green. When that glow
became da