his hand and arm out into
the full path of the sun. He had just stripped off the skin-case
bandage, to show the raw seam of a half-healed scar, but as he flexed
muscles, bent and twisted his arm, there was only a small residue of
soreness left.

"Now what, or where?" he asked Thorvald with some eagerness. Several
days' imprisonment in this room had made him impatient for the outer
world again. Like the officer, he now wore breeches of the green fabric,
the only material known to the Wyverns, and his own badly worn boots.
Oddly enough, the Terrans' weapons, stunner and knife, had been left to
them, a point which made them uneasy, since it suggested that the
Wyverns believed they had nothing to fear from clumsy alien arms.

"Your guess is as good as mine," Thorvald answered that double question.
"But it is you they want to see; they insisted upon it, rather
emphatically in fact."

The Wyvern city existed as a series of cell-like hollows in the interior
of a rock-walled island. Outside there had been no tampering with the
natural rugged features of the escarpment, and within, the silence was
almost complete. For all the Terrans could learn, the population of the
stone-walled hive might have been several thousand, or just the handful
that they had seen with their own eyes along the passages which had been
declared open territory for them.

Shann half expected to find again a skull-walled chamber where witches
tossed colored sticks to determine his future. But he came with Thorvald
into an oval room in which most of the outer wall was a window. And
seeing what lay framed in that, Shann halted, again uncertain as to
whether he actually saw that, or whether he was willed into visualizing
a scene by the choice of his hostesses.

They were lower now than the room in which he had nursed his wound, not
far above water level. And this window faced the sea. Across a stretch
of green water was his red-purple skull, the waves lapping its lower
jaw, spreading their foam in between the gaping rock-fringe which formed
its teeth. And from the eye hollows flapped the clak-claks of the sea
coast, coming and going as if they carried to some imprisoned brain
within that giant bone case messages from the outer world.

"My dream----" Shann said.

"Your dream." Thorvald had not echoed that; the answer had come in his
brain.

Shann turned his head and surveyed the Wyvern awaiting them with a
concentration which was close to the rudenes