hful of the water lapping against his chin. The
taste was brackish, but not entirely salt, and though it stung his lips,
the liquid relieved a measure of his thirst.

Only no glowing crystals appeared to stud these walls, and Shann's hope
that they were on their way to the cavern of the island faded. The
current grew swifter, and he had to fight to keep his head above water,
his tired body reacting sluggishly to commands.

The murmur of the racing flood drummed louder in his ears, or was that
sound the same? He could no longer be sure. Shann only knew that it was
close to impossible to snatch the necessary breath as he was rolled over
and over in the hurrying flood.

In the end he was ejected into blazing, blinding light, into a
suffocation of wild water as the bullet in an ancient Terran rifle might
have been fired at no specific target. Gasping, beaten, more than
half-drowned, Shann was pummeled by waves, literally driven up on a
rocky surface which skinned his body cruelly. He lay there, his arms
moving feebly until he contrived to raise himself in time to be
wretchedly sick. Somehow he crawled on a few feet farther before he
subsided again, blinded by the light, flinching from the heat of the
rocks on which he lay, but unable to do more for himself.

His first coherent thought was that his speculation concerning the
reality of this experience was at last resolved. This could not possibly
be an hallucination; at least this particular sequence of events was
not. And he was still hazily considering that when a hand fell on his
shoulder, fingers biting into his raw flesh.

Shann snarled, rolled over on his side. Thorvald, water dripping from
his rags--or rather steaming from them--his shaggy hair plastered to his
skull, sat there.

"You all right?"

Shann sat up in turn, shielding his smarting eyes. He was bruised,
battered badly enough, but he could claim no major injuries.

"I think so. Where are we?"

Thorvald's lips stretched across his teeth in what was more a grimace
than a smile. "Right off the map, any map I know. Take a look."

They were on a scrap of beach--beach which was more like a reef, for it
lacked any covering comparable to sand except for some cupfuls of coarse
gravel locked in rock depressions. Rocks, red as the rust of dried
blood, rose in fantastic water-sculptured shapes around the small
semi-level space they had somehow won.

This space was V-shaped, washed by equal streams on either