nts, speculations. He wanted to get out, back into the open
air where perhaps the clean winds of the heights would blow some of
this frightening half knowledge from his benumbed mind. He lurched down
the corridor, puzzled now by the problem of getting back to the window
level.

Here, before him, was the pillar. Without hope, but still obeying some
buried instinct, Travis again set his hands to its surface. There was a
tug at his cramped arms; once more his body was sucked to the pillar.
This time he was rising!

He held his breath past the first level and then relaxed. The principle
of this weird form of transportation was entirely beyond his
understanding, but as long as it worked in reverse he didn't care to
find out. He reached the windowed chamber, but the sunlight had left it;
instead, the clean cut of moon sweep lay on the dusty floor. He must
have been hours in that underground place.

Travis pulled away from the embrace of the pillar. The bar of his wooden
lance was still across the window and he ran for it. To catch the
scouting party at the pass he must hurry. The report they would make to
the clan now had to be changed radically in the face of his new
discoveries. The Apaches dared not retreat southward and withdraw from
the fight, leaving the Reds to use what treasure lay here.

As he hit the pavement below he looked about for the coyotes. Then he
tried the mind call. But as mysteriously as they had met him in the
valley, so now were they gone again. And Travis had no time to hunt for
them. With a sigh, he began his race to the pass.

In the old days, Travis remembered, Apache warriors had been able to
cover forty-five or fifty miles a day on foot and over rough territory.
But perhaps his modern breeding had slowed him. He had been so sure he
could catch up before the others were through the pass. But he stood now
in the hollow where they had camped, read the sign of overturned stone
and bent twig left for him, and knew they would reach the rancheria and
report the decision Deklay and the others wanted before he could head
them off.

Travis slogged on. He was so tired now that only the drug from the
sustenance tablets he mouthed at intervals kept him going at a dogged
pace, hardly more than a swift walk. And always his mind was haunted by
fragments of pictures, pictures he had seen in the reader. The big bomb
had been the nightmare of his own world for so long, and what was that
against the forces the