her--I'm not too well
up on Fourth Level history--but whatever, your line of operation didn't
have it. Probably just as well for them, though they very likely had
something else, as bad or worse. I put in a complaint to Supplies about
it, and got you some more ammunition and reloading tools. Now, tell me
what you're going to do about this nighthound business."

Tortha Karf was silent for a while, after Verkan Vall had finished.

"You're taking some awful chances, Vall," he said, at length. "The way
you plan doing it, the advantages will all be with the nighthound. Those
things can see as well at night as you can in daylight. I suppose you
know that, though; you're the nighthound specialist, now."

"Yes. But they're accustomed to the Venus hotland marshes; it's been dry
weather for the last two weeks, all over the northeastern section of the
Northern Continent. I'll be able to hear it, long before it gets close
to me. And I'll be wearing an electric headlamp. When I snap that on,
it'll be dazzled, for a moment."

"Well, as I said, you're the nighthound specialist. There's the
communicator; order anything you need." He lit a fresh cigarette from
the end of the old one before crushing it out. "But be careful, Vall.
It took me close to forty years to make a paratimer out of you; I
don't want to have to repeat the process with somebody else before
I can retire."

* * * * *

The grass was wet as Verkan Vall--who reminded himself that here he
was called Richard Lee--crossed the yard from the farmhouse to the
ramshackle barn, in the early autumn darkness. It had been raining
that morning when the strato-rocket from Dhergabar had landed him at
the Hagraban Synthetics Works, on the First Level; unaffected by the
probabilities of human history, the same rain had been coming down on
the old Kinchwalter farm, near Rutter's Fort, on the Fourth Level.
And it had persisted all day, in a slow, deliberate drizzle.

He didn't like that. The woods would be wet, muffling his quarry's
footsteps, and canceling his only advantage over the night-prowler he
hunted. He had no idea, however, of postponing the hunt. If anything,
the rain had made it all the more imperative that the nighthound be
killed at once. At this season, a falling temperature would speedily
follow. The nighthound, a creature of the hot Venus marshes, would
suffer from the cold, and, taught by years of domestication to find
warmth among h