al, he was prepared for the way
Ashe melted into cover in the brush.

They worked their way, sometimes crawling on their bellies, through the
wet stands of dead grass, taking full advantage of all cover. They
crouched at the top of the hill while Ashe parted the prickly branches
of an evergreen bush to make them a window.

The black patch left by the fire, which had come from a ruin above, had
spread downhill on the opposite side of the valley. Charred posts still
stood like lone teeth in a skull to mark what must have once been one of
the stockade walls of a post. But all they now guarded was a desolation
from which came that overpowering stench.

"Our post?" Ross asked in a whisper.

Ashe nodded. He was studying the scene with an intent absorption which,
Ross knew, would impress every important detail upon his mind. That the
place had been burned was clear from the first. But why and by whom was
a problem vital to the two lurking in the brush.

It took them almost an hour to cross the valley--an hour of hiding,
casting about, searching. They had made a complete circle of the
destroyed post and Ashe stood in the shadow of a copse, rubbing clots of
mud from his hands and frowning up at the charred posts.

"They weren't rushed. Or if they were, the attackers covered their trail
afterward--" Ross ventured.

The older man shook his head. "Tribesmen would not have muddled a trail
if they had won. No, this was no regular attack. There have been no
signs of a war party coming or leaving."

"Then what?" demanded Ross.

"Lightning for one thing--and we'd better hope it was that. Or--"
Ashe's blue eyes were very cold and bleak, as cold and bleak as the
countryside about them.

"Or--?" Ross dared to prompt him.

"Or we have made contact with the Reds in the wrong way!"

Ross's hand instinctively went to the dagger at his belt. Little help a
dagger would be in an unequal struggle like this! They were only two in
a thin web of men strung out through centuries of time with orders to
seek out that which did not fit properly into the pattern of the past:
to locate the enemy wherever in history or prehistory he had gone to
earth. Had the Reds been searching, too, and was this first disaster
their victory?

The time traders had their evidence when they at last ventured into what
had been the heart of Outpost Gog. Ross, inexperienced as he was in such
matters, could not mistake the signs of the explosion. There was a
cra