ar, the chief of animal
control, before he could lock up the delinquents. And the memory of the
resulting interview still had the power to make him flush with impotent
anger. Shann's explanation had been contemptuously brushed aside, and he
had been delivered an ultimatum. If his carelessness occurred again, he
would be sent back on the next supply ship, to be dismissed without an
official sign-off on his work record, thus locked out of even the lowest
level of Survey for the rest of his life.

That was why Garth Thorvald's act of the night before had made Shann
brave the unknown darkness of Warlock alone when he had discovered that
the test animals were gone. He had to locate and return them before
Fadakar made his morning inspection; Garth Thorvald's attempt to get him
into bad trouble had saved his life.

Shann cowered back, striving to make his huddled body as small as
possible. One of the Throg flyers appeared silently out of the misty
amber of the morning sky, hovering over the silent camp. The aliens were
coming in to inspect the site of their victory. And the safest place for
any Terran now was as far from the vicinity of those silent domes as he
could get. Shann's slight body was an asset as he wedged through the
narrow mouth of a cleft and so back into the cliff wall. The climb
before him he knew in part, for this was the path the wolverines had
followed on their two other escapes. A few moments of tricky scrambling
and he was out in a cuplike depression choked with brush covered with
the purplish foliage of Warlock. On the other side of that was a small
cut to a sloping hillside, giving on another valley, not as wide as that
in which the camp stood, but one well provided with cover in the way of
trees and high-growing bushes.

A light wind pushed among the trees, and twice Shann heard the harsh,
rasping call of a clak-clak--one of the bat-like leather-winged flyers
that laired in pits along the cliff walls. That present snap of two-tone
complaint suggested that the land was empty of strangers. For the
clak-claks vociferously and loudly resented encroachment on their chosen
hunting territory.

Shann hesitated. He was driven by the urge to put as much distance
between him and the landing Throg ship as he could. But to arouse the
attention of inquisitive clak-claks was asking for trouble. Perhaps it
would be best to keep on along the top of the cliff, rather than risk a
descent to take cover in the valley th