dden flash
shook him, raised the dull ache still troubling his temples into a
punishing throb. Going down on his knees, Rynch once more turned to
the stream water; this time after splashing it onto his face, he drank
from his cupped hands.

Rynch swayed, his wet hands over his eyes, digging fingertips into the
skin of his forehead to ease that pain bursting in his skull. Sitting
in a room, drinking from a cup--it was as if a shadow picture fitted
over the reality of the stream, rocks and brush about him. He had sat
in a room, had drank from a cup--that action had been important!

A sharp, hot pain made him lose contact with that shadow. He looked
down. From the gravel, from under rocks, gathered an army of
blue-black, hard-shelled things, their clawed forelimbs extended, blue
sense organs raised on fleshy stalks well above their heads, all
turned towards the dead feline.

Rynch slapped out vigorously, stumbled into the water loosening the
hold of two vicious scavengers on the torn skin of his ankle when he
waded out knee-deep. Already that black tongue of small bodies licked
across the red-haired side of the hunter. Within minutes the corpse
would be only well-cleaned bones.

Retrieving his spear and net, Rynch immersed both in the water to
clean off attackers, and hurried on, splashing through the creek until
he was well away from the vicinity of the kill. A little later he
flushed a four-footed creature from between two rocks and killed it
with one blow from his spear haft. He skinned his kill, feeling the
substance of the skill. Was it exceedingly rough hide, or rudimentary
scales? And knew a return of that puzzlement.

He felt, he thought painfully as he toasted the dry looking, grayish
meat on a sharpened stick, as if a part of him knew very well what
manner of animal he had killed. And yet, far inside him, another
person he could not understand stood aloof watching in amazement.

He was Rynch Brodie, and he had been traveling on the Largo Drift with
his mother.

Memory presented him automatically with a picture of a thin woman with
a narrow, rather unhappy face, a twist of elaborately dressed hair in
which jeweled lights sparkled. There had been something bad--memory
was no longer exact but chaotic. And his head ached as he tried to
recall that time with greater clarity. Afterwards the L-B and a man
with him in it--

"Simmons Tait!"

An officer, badly hurt. He had died when the L-B landed here. Rynch