lay only
inches away. For the pull of curiosity was warring inside him against
the stern warnings of his Elders.

Once when Dalgard had been very small he had raided his father's trip
bag after the next to the last exploring journey the elder Nordis had
made. And he had found a clear block of some kind of greenish crystal,
in the heart of which threadlike lines of color wove patterns which
were utterly strange. When he had turned the block in his hand, those
lines had whirled and changed to form new and intricate designs. And
when he had watched them intently it had seemed that something
happened inside his mind and he knew, here and there, a word, a
fragment of alien thought--just as he normally communicated with the
cub who was Sssuri or the hoppers of the field. And his surprise had
been so great that he had gone running to his father with the cube and
the story of what happened when one watched it.

But there had been no praise for his discovery. Instead he had been
hurried off to the chamber where an old, old man, the son of the Great
Man who had planned to bring them across space, lay in his bed. And
Forken Kordov himself had talked to Dalgard in his old voice, a voice
as withered and thin as the hands crossed helplessly on his shrunken
body, explaining in simple, kindly words that the knowledge which lay
in the cubes, in the oddly shaped books which the Terrans sometimes
came across in the ruins, was not for them. That his own
great-grandfather Dard Nordis, who had been one of the first of the
mutant line of sensitives, had discovered that. And Dalgard, impressed
by Forken, by his father's concern, and by all the circumstances of
that day, had never forgotten nor lost that warning.

"_We_ cannot hope to stop them," Sssuri pointed out. "But we must
learn when they will come again and be waiting for them--with your
people and mine. For I tell you now, brother of the knife, they must
not be allowed to rise once more!"

"And how can we foretell their coming?" Dalgard wanted to know.

"Perhaps that alone we cannot do. But when they come they will not
leave speedily. They have stayed here before without harm, and their
distrust has been lulled. When next they come, it will be only
according to their natures that they will wish to stay longer. Not
snatching up the closest to hand of these treasures of theirs, but
choosing out with care those things which will give them the best
results. Therefore they may make a