and taken over by his
Beaker cover, hesitated too. Yet he could not give up, and the others
left him there, his eyes on the forbidden heights, unhappy and tormented
by more than the headaches which still came and went with painful
regularity. In the mountains lay what he sought--a hidden something
within his brain told him that over and over--but the mountains were
taboo, and he should not venture into them.

How long he might have hesitated there if he had not come upon the
trail, Ross did not know. But on the day after the hunters of Ulffa's
clan left, a glint of sunlight striking between two trees pointed out a
woodsman's blaze on a third tree trunk. The two halves of Ross's memory
clicked together for an instant as he examined that cut. He knew that it
marked a trace and he pushed on, hunting a second cut and then a third.
Convinced that these would lead him into the unknown territory, Ross's
desire to explore overcame the grafted superstitions of his briefing.

There were other signs that this was an often-traveled route: a spring
cleared of leaves and walled with stone, a couple of steps cut in the
turf on a steep slope. Ross moved warily, alert to any sound. He might
not be an expert woodsman, but he was learning fast, perhaps the faster
because his false memories now supplanted the real ones.

That night he built no fire, crawling instead into the heart of a rotted
log to sleep, awakening once to the call of a wolf and another time at
the distant crash of a dead tree yielding to wind.

In the morning he was about to climb back to the trail he had prudently
left the night before when he saw five bearded, fur-clad men looking
much the same as Ulffa's people. Ross hugged the earth and watched them
pass out of sight before he followed.

All that day he wove an up-and-down trail behind the small band,
sometimes catching sight of them as they topped a rise well ahead or
stopped to eat. It was late afternoon when he crept cautiously to the
top of a ridge and gazed down into a valley.

There was a town in that valley, sturdy houses of logs behind a
stockade. He had seen towns vaguely like it before, yet it had a
dreamlike quality as if it were not as real as it appeared.

Ross rested his chin on his arms and watched that town and the people
moving in it. Some were fur-clad hunters, but others dressed quite
differently. He started up with a little cry at the sight of one of the
men who had walked so swiftly from o