als shells? Even
the waves came in languidly. And the breeze which ruffled his hair,
smoothed about his sun-browned, half-bare body, caressed it, did not
buffet on its way inland to stir the growths which the Terran settlers
called "trees" but which possessed long lacy fronds instead of true
branches.

Hawaika--named for the old Polynesian paradise--a world seemingly
without flaw except the subtle one of being too perfect, too welcoming,
too wooing. Its long, uneventful, unchanging days enticed forgetfulness,
offered a life without effort. Except for the mystery....

Because this world was not the one pictured on the tape which had
brought the Terran settlement team here. A map, a directing guide, a
description all in one, that was the ancient voyage tape. Ross himself
had helped to loot a storehouse on an unknown planet for a cargo of such
tapes. Once they had been the space-navigation guides for a race or
races who had ruled the star lanes ten thousand years in his own world's
past, a civilization which had long since sunk again into the dust of
its beginning.

Those tapes returned to Terra after their chance discovery, were
studied, probed, deciphered by the best brains of his time, shared out
by lot between already suspicious Terran powers, bringing into the
exploration of space bitter rivalries and old hatreds.

Such a tape had landed their ship on Hawaika, a world of shallow seas
and archipelagoes instead of true continents. The settlement team had
had all the knowledge contained on that tape crowded into them, only to
discover that much they had learned from it was false!

Of course, none of them had expected to discover here still the cities,
the civilization the tape had projected as existing in that long-ago
period. But no present island string they had visited approximated those
on the maps they had seen, and so far they had not found any trace that
any intelligent beings had walked, built, lived, on these beautiful,
slumberous atolls. So, what had happened to the Hawaika of the tape?

Ross's right hand rubbed across the ridged scars which disfigured his
left one, to be carried for the rest of his life as a mark of his
meeting with the star voyagers in the past of his own world. He had
deliberately seared his own flesh to break the mental control they had
asserted. Then the battle had gone to him. But from it he had brought
another scar--the unease of that old terror when Ross Murdock, fighter,
rebel,