scared-stiff native heading
back for home as fast as it could go.

He flicked the control on the rifle back to single fire, crawled
around the rock pile and sprinted for a grove of trees that stood on
higher ground. He reached them and there he flanked the spot from
which the arrow must have come.

He unlimbered the binoculars and glassed the area. He still saw no
sign. Whatever had taken the pot shot at them had made its getaway.

He walked back to the tree where the arrow still stood out, its point
driven deep into the bark. He grasped the shaft and wrenched the arrow
free.

"You can come out now," he called to Sipar. "There's no one around."

The arrow was unbelievably crude. The unfeathered shaft looked as if
it had been battered off to the proper length with a jagged stone. The
arrowhead was unflaked flint picked up from some outcropping or dry
creek bed, and it was awkwardly bound to the shaft with the tough but
pliant inner bark of the hula-tree.

"You recognize this?" he asked Sipar.

The native took the arrow and examined it. "Not my tribe."

"Of course not your tribe. Yours wouldn't take a shot at us. Some
other tribe, perhaps?"

"Very poor arrow."

"I know that. But it could kill you just as dead as if it were a good
one. Do you recognize it?"

"No tribe made this arrow," Sipar declared.

"Child, maybe?"

"What would child do way out here?"

[Illustration]

"That's what I thought, too," said Duncan.

* * * * *

He took the arrow back, held it between his thumbs and forefingers and
twirled it slowly, with a terrifying thought nibbling at his brain. It
couldn't be. It was too fantastic. He wondered if the sun was finally
getting him that he had thought of it at all.

He squatted down and dug at the ground with the makeshift arrow point.
"Sipar, what do you actually know about the Cytha?"

"Nothing, mister. Scared of it is all."

"We aren't turning back. If there's something that you know--something
that would help us...."

It was as close as he could come to begging aid. It was further than
he had meant to go. He should not have asked at all, he thought
angrily.

"I do not know," the native said.

Duncan cast the arrow to one side and rose to his feet. He cradled the
rifle in his arm. "Let's go."

He watched Sipar trot ahead. Crafty little stinker, he told himself.
It knows more than it's telling.

They toiled into the afternoon. It was, if possi