ngers wear many coverings on their bodies as do
_they_, and they had also coverings upon their heads. They were
bigger. Also from their minds I learned that they are not of this
world--"

"Not of this world!" Dalgard burst out in his own speech.

"There!" The spy was triumphant. "So did they talk to one another, not
with the mind but by making mouth noises, different mouth noises from
those that _they_ make. Yes, they are like--but unlike this one."

"And these strangers flew the ship we have not seen before?"

"It is so. But they did not know the way and were guided by the globe.
And at least one among them was distrustful of _those_ and wished to
be free to return to his own place. He walked by the rocks near my
hiding place, and I read his thoughts. No, they were with _them_, but
they are not _them_!"

"And now they have gone on to the city?" Sssuri probed.

"It was the way their ship flew."

"Like me," Dalgard repeated, and then the truth which might lie behind
that exploded within his brain. "Terrans!" he breathed the word. Men
of Pax perhaps who had come to hunt down the outlaws who had
successfully eluded their rule on earth? But how had the colonists
been traced? And why? Or were they other fugitives like themselves? So
much, so very much of what the colonists should know of their past
had been erased during the time of the Great Sickness twenty years
after their landing. Then three fourths of the original immigrants had
died. Only the children of the second generation and a handful of
weakened Elders had remained. Knowledge was lost and some distorted by
failing memories, old skills were gone. But if the new Terrans were in
that city.... He had to know--to know and be able to warn his people.
For the darkness of Pax was a memory they had _not_ lost!

"I must see them," he said.

"That is true. And only you can tell us what manner of folk these
strangers be," the merman chief agreed. "Therefore you shall go ashore
with my warriors and look upon them--to tell us the truth. Also we
must learn what _they_ do here."

It was decided that using waterways known to the merpeople, one which
Dalgard could also take wearing the diving equipment, a scouting party
would head shoreward the next day, with the river itself providing the
entrance into the heart of the forbidden territory.

12

ALIEN PATROL

Raf leaned back against the wall. Long since the actions of the aliens
in the storage house had ce