ny-armed creature of the sea might allow its
appendages to float in the water which supported it. Tendrils crossed,
met, and thickened. There was a growing river of eerie light which
spread, again resembling a sea wave licking out onto the field. And
where it touched, unlike the wave, it did not retreat, but lapped on.
Was he actually seeing that? Shann could not be sure.

Only the gray light continued to build, faster now, its speed of advance
matching its increase in bulk. Shann somehow connected it with the veil
of illusion. If it was real, there was a purpose behind it.

There was an aroused clicking from the Throgs. A blaster bolt cracked,
its spiteful, sickly yellow slicing into the nearest tongue of gray. But
that luminous fog engulfed the blast and was not dispelled. Shann forced
his head around against the support which held him. The mist crept
across the field from all quarters, walling them in.

Running at the ungainly lope which was their best effort at speed were
half a dozen Throgs emerging from the river section. Their attitude
suggested panic-stricken flight, and when one tripped on some unseen
obstruction and went down--to fall beneath a descending tongue of
phosphorescence--he uttered a strange high-pitched squeal, thin and
faint, but still a note of complete, mindless terror.

The Throgs surrounding Shann were firing at the fog, first with
precision, then raggedly, as their bolts did nothing to cut that opaque
curtain drawing in about them. From inside that mist came other
sounds--noises, calls, and cries all alien to him, and perhaps also to
the Throgs. There were shapes barely to be discerned through the swirls;
perhaps some were Throgs in flight. But certainly others were non-Throg
in outline. And the Terran was sure that at least three of those shapes,
all different, had been in pursuit of one fleeing Throg, heading him off
from that small open area still holding about Shann.

For the Throgs were being herded in from all sides--the handful who had
come from the river, the others who had brought Shann there. And the
action of the mist was pushing them into a tight knot. Would they
eventually turn on him, wanting to make sure of their prisoner before
they made a last stand against whatever lurked in the fog? To Shann's
continued relief the aliens seemed to have forgotten him. Even when one
cowered back against the very edge of the frame on which the Terran was
bound, the beetle-head did not look