f hill to the edge of the jungle. It was too
dark to see much inside the hut.

Something blocked the light of the doorway, a tall animallike figure.
On second look Jason realized it was a man with long hair and thick
beard. He was dressed in furs, even his legs were wrapped in fur
leggings. His eyes were fixed on his captive, while one hand fondled an
ax that hung from his waist.

"Who're you? What y'want?" the bearded man asked suddenly.

Jason picked his words slowly, wondering if this savage shared the same
hair-trigger temper as the city dwellers.

"My name is Jason. I come in peace. I want to be your friend ..."

"Lies!" the man grunted, and pulled the ax from his belt. "Junkman
tricks. I saw y'hide. Wait to kill me. Kill you first." He tested the
edge of the blade with a horny thumb, then raised it.

"Wait!" Jason said desperately. "You don't understand."

The ax swung down.

"I'm from off-world and--"

A solid thunk shook him as the ax buried itself in the wood next to his
head. At the last instant the man had twitched it aside. He grabbed the
front of Jason's clothes and pulled him up until their faces touched.

"S'true?" he shouted. "Y'from off-world?" His hand opened and Jason
dropped back before he could answer. The savage jumped over him, towards
the dim rear of the hut.

"Rhes must know of this," he said as he fumbled with something on the
wall. Light sprang out.

All Jason could do was stare. The hairy, fur-covered savage was
operating a communicator. The calloused, dirt-encrusted fingers deftly
snapped open the circuits, dialed a number.

XVI.

It made no sense. Jason tried to reconcile the modern machine with the
barbarian and couldn't. Who was he calling? The existence of one
communicator meant there was at least another. Was Rhes a person or a
thing?

With a mental effort he grabbed hold of his thoughts and braked them to
a stop. There was something new here, factors he hadn't counted on. He
kept reassuring himself there was an explanation for everything, once
you had your facts straight.

Jason closed his eyes, shutting out the glaring rays of the sun where it
cut through the tree tops, and reconsidered his facts. They separated
evenly into two classes; those he had observed for himself, and those he
had learned from the city dwellers. This last class of "facts" he would
hold, to see if they fitted with what he learned. There was a good
chance that most, or all, of them wo