which could not be dismissed as an animal,
clever and cunning, but limited to beast range. Six cubs had been
brought back on the first expedition, coyote in body, their developing
minds different. The grandchildren of those cubs were now in the ship's
cages, their mutated senses alert, ready for the slightest chance of
escape. Sent to Topaz as eyes and ears for less keenly endowed humans,
they were not completely under the domination of man. The range of their
mental powers was still uncomprehended by those who had bred, trained,
and worked with them from the days their eyes had opened and they had
taken their first wobbly steps away from their dams.

The male growled again, his lips wrinkling back in a snarl as the
emanations of fear from the men he could not see reached panic peak. He
still crouched, belly flat, on the protecting pads of his cage; but he
strove now to wriggle closer to the door, just as his mate made the same
effort.

Between the animals and those in the control cabin lay the others--forty
of them. Their bodies were cushioned and protected with every ingenious
device known to those who had placed them there so many weeks earlier.
Their minds were free of the ship, roving into places where men had not
trod before, a territory potentially more dangerous than any solid earth
could ever be.

Operation Retrograde had returned men bodily into the past, sending
agents to hunt mammoths, follow the roads of the Bronze Age traders,
ride with Attila and Genghis Khan, pull bows among the archers of
ancient Egypt. But Redax returned men in mind to the paths of their
ancestors, or this was the theory. And those who slept here and now in
their narrow boxes, lay under its government, while the men who had
arbitrarily set them so could only assume they were actually reliving
the lives of Apache nomads in the wide southwestern wastes of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Above, the pilot's hand pushed out again, fighting the pressure to reach
one particular button. That, too, had been a last-minute addition, an
experiment which had only had partial testing. To use it was the final
move he could make, and he was already half convinced of its
uselessness.

With no faith and only a very wan hope, he sent that round of metal
flush with the board. What followed no one ever lived to explain.

On the planet the installation which tracked the missiles flashed on a
screen bright enough to blind momentar