baring teeth in warning against all comers.

With great difficulty, Travis topped a rise. Ahead against the skyline
stood both coyotes. And, as the man joined them, first one and then the
other flung back its head and sounded the sobbing, shattering cry which
had been a part of that other life.

The Apache looked down. His puzzle was answered in part. The wreckage
crumpled on the mountain side was identifiable--a spaceship! Cold fear
gripped him and his own head went back; from between his tight lips came
a cry as desolate and despairing as the one the animals had voiced.

4

Fire, mankind's oldest ally, weapon, tool, leaped high before the naked
stone of the mountain side. Men sat cross-legged about it, fifteen of
them. And behind, guarded by the flames and that somber circle, were the
women. There was a uniformity in this gathering. The members were
plainly all of the same racial stock, of medium height, stocky yet fined
down to the peak of stamina and endurance, their skin brown, their
shoulder-length hair black. And they were all young--none over thirty,
some still in their late teens. Alike, too, was a certain drawn look in
their faces, a tenseness of the eyes and mouth as they listened to
Travis.

"So we must be on Topaz. Do any of you remember boarding the ship?"

"No. Only that we awoke within it." Across the fire one chin lifted; the
eyes which caught Travis' held a deep, smoldering anger. "This is more
trickery of the Pinda-lick-o-yi, the White Eyes. Between us there has
never been fair dealing. They have broken their promise as a man breaks
a rotten stick, for their words are as rotten. And it was you, Fox, who
brought us to listen to them."

A stir about the circle, a murmur from the women.

"And do I not also sit here with you in this strange wilderness?" he
countered.

"I do not understand," another of the men held out his hand, palm up, in
a gesture of asking--"what has happened to us. We were in the old Apache
world.... I, Jil-Lee, was riding with Cuchillo Negro as we went down to
the taking of Ramos. And then I was here, in a broken ship and beside me
a dead man who was once my brother. How did I come out of the past of
our people into another world across the stars?"

"Pinda-lick-o-yi tricks!" The first speaker spat into the fire.

"It was the Redax, I think," Travis replied. "I heard Dr. Ashe discuss
this. A new machine which could make a man remember not his own past,
but the pas