head so gray eyes met golden ones. The web of communication which
had held all three of them snapped. Thorvald and the Wyvern were linked
in a tight circuit which excluded Shann.

Then the latter became conscious of movement beside him. The younger
Wyvern had joined him to watch the clak-claks in their circling of the
bare dome of the skull island.

"Why do they fly so?" Shann asked her.

"Within they nest, care for their young. Also they hunt the rock
creatures that swarm in the lower darkness."

"The rock creatures?" If the skull's interior was infested by some other
native fauna, he wanted to know it.

By some method of her own the young Wyvern conveyed a strong impression
of revulsion, which was her personal reaction to the "rock creatures."

"Yet you imprison the Throg there----" he remarked.

"Not so!" Her denial was instantaneous and vehement. "The other worlder
fled into that place in spite of our calling. There he stays in hiding.
Once we drew him out to the sea, but he broke the power and fled inside
again."

"Broke free----" Shann pounced upon that. "From disk control?"

"But surely." Her reply held something of wonder. "Why do you ask, star
voyager? Did you not also break free from the power of the disk when I
led you by the underground ways, awaking in the river? Do you then rate
this other one as less than your own breed that you think him incapable
of the same action?"

"Of Throgs I know as much as this...." He held up his hand, measuring
off a fraction of space between thumb and forefinger.

"Yet you knew them before you came to this world."

"My people have known them for long. We have met and fought many times
among the stars."

"And never have you talked mind to mind?"

"Never. We have sought for that, but there has been no communication
between us, neither of mind nor of voice."

"This one you name Throg is truly not as you," she assented. "And we are
not as you, being alien and female. Yet, star man, you and I have shared
a dream."

Shann stared at her, startled, not so much by what she said as the human
shading of those words in his mind. Or had that also been illusion?

"In the veil ...that creature which came to you on wings when you
remembered that. A good dream, though it came out of the past and so was
false in the present. But I have gathered it into my own store: such a
fine dream, one that you have cherished."

"Trav was to be cherished," he agreed soberly. "I found he