as this,"
Jellico reminded them.

"So it would be something which we would all use, which we had to depend
upon...."

"The water!" Dane had been holding his own canteen ready to drink. But
as that possible explanation dawned in his mind, he smelled instead of
tasted the liquid sloshing inside. There was no odor he could detect.
But he remembered Tau commenting on the powdered purifier pills at their
first camp.

"That's it!" Tau dug further into his kit, brought out the vial of white
powder with its grainy lumps. Pouring a little into the palm of his hand
he smelled it, touched it with the tip of his tongue. "Purifier and
something else," he reported. "It could be one of half a dozen drugs, or
some native stuff from here which we've never classified."

"True. There are drugs we have found here." Asaki scowled down at the
green mat of jungle. "So our water is poisoned?"

"Do you always purify it?" Tau asked the Chief Ranger. "Surely during
the centuries since your ancestors landed on Khatka you must have
adapted to native water. You couldn't have lived otherwise. We must use
the purifier, but must you?"

"There is water and water." Asaki shook his own canteen, his scowl
growing fiercer as the gurgle from its depths was heard. "From springs
on the other side of the mountains we drink--yes. But over here, this
close to the Mygra swamps, we have not done so. We may have to chance
it."

"Do you think we are literally poisoned?" Jellico bored directly to the
heart of their private fears.

"None of us have been drinking too heavily," Tau observed thoughtfully.
"And I don't believe Lumbrilo had outright killing in mind. How long the
effect will last I have no way of telling."

"If we saw one rock ape," Dane wondered, "why didn't we see others? And
why here and now?"

"That!" Tau pointed ahead on the trail Asaki had picked for their
ascent. For a long moment Dane could see nothing of any interest there
and then he located it--a finger of rock. It did not point directly
skyward this time, in fact it slanted so that its tip indicated their
back trail. Yet in outline the spire was very similar to that outcrop
from which the real rock ape had charged them the day before.

Asaki exclaimed in his own tongue and slapped his hand hard against the
stock of the needler.

"We saw that and so again we saw an ape also! Had earlier we been
charged by graz or jumped by a lion in such a place, then again we would
have been fac