l the beads, both
parties well pleased with their bargains.

Sssuri splashed out of the sea with as little ado as he had entered.
On the end of his spear twisted a fish. His fur, slicked flat to his
strongly muscled body, began to dry in the air and fluff out while the
sun awoke prismatic lights on the scales which covered his hands and
feet. He dispatched the fish and cleaned it neatly, tossing the offal
back into the water, where some shadowy things arose to tear at the
unusual bounty.

"This is not hunting ground." His message formed in Dalgard's mind.
"That finned one had no fear of me."

"We were right then in heading north; this is new land." Dalgard got
to his feet.

On either side, the cliffs, with their alternate bands of red, blue,
yellow, and white strata, walled in this pocket. They would make far
better time keeping to the sea lanes, where it was not necessary to
climb. And it was Dalgard's cherished plan to add more than just an
inch or two to the explorers' map in the Council Hall.

Each of the colony males was expected to make his man-journey of
discovery sometimes between his eighteenth and twentieth year. He went
alone or, if he formed an attachment with one of the mermen near his
own age, accompanied only by his knife brother. And from knowledge so
gained the still-small group of exiles added to and expanded their
information about their new home.

Caution was drilled into them. For they were not the first masters of
Astra, nor were they the masters now. There were the ruins left by
Those Others, the race who had populated this planet until their own
wars had completed their downfall. And the mermen, with their
traditions of slavery and dark beginnings in the experimental pens of
the older race, continued to insist that across the sea--on the
unknown western continent--Those Others still held onto the remnants
of a degenerate civilization. Thus the explorers from Homeport went
out by ones and twos and used the fauna of the land as a means of
gathering information.

Hoppers could remember yesterday only dimly, and instinct took care of
tomorrow. But what happened today sped from hopper to hopper and could
warn by mind touch both merman and human. If one of the dread
snake-devils of the interior was on the hunting trail, the hoppers
sped the warning. Their vast curiosity brought them to the fringe of
any disturbance, and they passed the reason for it along. Dalgard knew
there were a thousand e